AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog

It’s no surprise that organizations are worried about becoming locked in to their cloud provider. After all, the history of IT is full of examples of vendors taking advantage of high switching costs to impose restrictive licensing terms and to increase prices. But I think that the cloud is different—and in fact, is making it […]

Customers often ask us how Amazon manages to sustain its pace of innovation. It is truly an amazing pace: on average, AWS releases a major new feature or service approximately once every five hours, day and night, 365 days a year. Since 90–95% of our roadmap comes from what customers tell us they need, you […]

Everyone who works in IT at Live Nation is familiar with the phrase “go faster than what is comfortable.” It was our CEO’s message to us when he called an IT leadership meeting in 2015 and shared his vision for how he wanted to modernize the company—a meeting that sparked a transformation of IT and […]

In my last post, I promised a user’s guide to the Cloud Strategy Canvas. Although the canvas is meant to stand alone, it helps to have a few insider tips and techniques gained from experience. To ensure that this guide is rooted in Lean innovation best practices, I collaborated with expert strategy facilitator Matthew E. […]

Recently, I sat down with seven leaders from both commercial enterprises and the public sector to hear how they approach developing a culture that enables innovation at scale. In a series of video interviews, we discussed the different roles that technology, people, and culture play as C-level executives navigate their organizations through the cloud journey. […]

One of the most common areas of interest from customer executives regarding their move to AWS is data protection. Data protection can take many forms (e.g., backups, high availability, long-term storage), but the focus for this blog post will be encryption. This post has been co-written with Scott Conklin, an encryption expert from our AWS Professional […]

A constraint is a limitation that’s placed upon us. In this post we’ll look at three different types of constraints—time constraints, resource constraints, and guardrails—and explore how each of them can be used to drive innovation, speed, and efficiency. Using Time Constraints to Focus on the Things That Matter In their post on The Two-Week […]

I have just posted a series of blog posts that are intended to paint a picture of IT finance for the future. They are related to one another in interesting ways (and hyperlinked, of course) so I thought I would lay out the full picture here. The ideas have emerged over a series of conversations […]

Who is accountable for managing the costs of a digital service? Enterprises are increasingly pushing accountability outward to cross-functional teams. There is an important reason for this: teams can make decisions and put them into action quickly, and speed is important. By putting a cross-functional group of people on the same team, the enterprise makes […]

As I have argued in my other posts, the digital world is bringing a radical change in the role of the CFO. For one thing, the cloud and DevOps are turning fixed costs into variable costs. For another, rapid iteration and delivery make it possible—and essential—for us to make financial decisions based on marginal costs […]