AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog
The CISO Perspective: How Chief Information Security Officers “Cross the River” to Cloud Adoption
In this guest post, Mignona Cote, the AWS Global Security Advisory lead, reports on her conversation with Jim Routh, Head of Enterprise Cybersecurity at MassMutual. Their discussion covers the challenges for CISOs who straddle the worlds of traditional information security and newer, digital. DevSecOps and cloud-based security paradigms. Ultimately, Routh says, CISOs must learn to […]
The CIO-CFO Conversation: Technical Debt—An Apt Term?
Sometimes we technologists can be a bit too clever for our own good. The term technical debt, attributed to Ward Cunningham in a 1992 OOPSLA conference speech¹, may be an example. We use the term often these days, generally in the context of justifying investments in nonfunctional aspects of IT; that is, investments intended to […]
Building an Effective Security Team: It’s More Than Just Technical Skills
As part of a new video series of discussions with security leaders, Verified: Presented by AWS re:Inforce, AWS CISO Steve Schmidt sat down with Emma Smith, Global Cyber Security Director at Vodafone, for a discussion on the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in security teams. Watch the full video on YouTube. Emma, a Diversity […]
The CISOs of Netflix and AWS Discuss Remote Work, Security Culture, and Cats as a Threat Model
As part of Verified: Presented by AWS re:Inforce, a new video series of discussions with security leaders, AWS CISO Steve Schmidt sat down with Jason Chan, VP of Information Security at Netflix, for a broad-ranging interview. Even though we couldn’t be together this year at AWS re:Inforce, we still wanted to create a platform for […]
The Seven S’s of Organizational Agility
We talk a lot about organizational agility. But what exactly does the term mean? By now, Agile software development and agile IT capability delivery have taken on a fairly precise meaning, even if it’s sometimes misunderstood. But one goal of IT agility is to support organizational agility, which is certainly a broader concept and more […]
The CIO and CFO Conversation
In earlier blog posts I’ve talked about the CIO-CFO relationship, how it’s changing, and how it needs to change. In this post I’ll begin delving into what sorts of conversations should really be taking place between CFOs and CIOs and how the CIO can better frame these discussions. Must-Spending: The Historical Focus Beginning in, oh, […]
Announcing The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy
I’m excited to announce the publication of my fourth book, The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy: Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler. Despite the whimsical title, it’s about a critical concern of enterprises transitioning to the cloud and trying to thrive in the digital economy. From our meetings with enterprise AWS […]
Reimagining Work for the Post-pandemic World
Larry Augustin, VP of Applications at AWS, shares how organizations are reimagining their post-pandemic workforces as part of a new blog series, Reimagining the Workforce. Eating lunch with a colleague, brainstorming around a whiteboard, kicking off a new project with a full room’s energy, celebrating a significant accomplishment together—these are some of the things I […]
Buy vs. Build Revisited, Part 3: From Having Bought to Going to Build
In my third installment on digging deeper into deciding between buying software and building it in house, I want to describe how organizations can transition from a “mostly bought” environment to one where they can productively build bespoke solutions. As an industry we are mildly guilty of repeatedly showing great target pictures but then falling […]
Four Anti-patterns When Establishing Centres of Excellence
In most organizations, the bottleneck is at the top of the bottle. —Peter Drucker Should technology be centralised or decentralised in an organisation? An easy question to ask, and one where leaders can talk themselves into believing there is a simple solution to a normally messy problem. If you accept that organisations are complex […]