AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog
CFO Series: Finance as a Competitive Advantage
The time has passed when CFOs could focus only on cost control and financial reporting. A company’s finance function, in the digital world, is a driver of competitive advantage, of strategy, and of innovation. In a competitive environment, the winner will be the company that best acquires financial resources, invests those resources in the right […]
Managing Your Cost Savings with Amazon Reserved Instances
By Erin Carlson, AWS Product Marketing Manager Introduction by Mark Schwartz One of the advantages of the cloud is that it allows you to right-size your infrastructure continuously—to add infrastructure when you need it and release infrastructure and stop paying for it when you don’t. This gives enterprises new degrees of freedom in managing their […]
CFO Series: Are IT Systems Like Other Capital Investments????
*Note: this post is not intended as accounting advice. It is about how to structure IT investments and make decisions about them, not how to account for them. Do IT projects have the characteristics of capital investments? I am not talking about their accounting treatment—that is outside my area of expertise. I am asking from […]
CFO Series: An Executive View of Lean and Agile IT
Over the last two decades, the IT profession has developed new ways of working that are intended to deliver better business value more quickly and at lower risk. Or as Jonathan Smart of Barclay’s likes to say, “Better, Faster, Safer, Happier.”[1] There are buzzwords associated with these techniques, of course, as with everything in IT—in this […]
Miners Extract More Value from the Cloud When They Transform Their Cultures
Jonathon Dixon, Global Head of Mining & Resources, Amazon Web Services Introduction by Thomas Blood, AWS Enterprise Strategist and Evangelist Until the 1930s, my family owned and operated gold, silver, and copper mines in Colorado. I have a fondness for mining, based on the stories my father shared with me about the people who extract […]
Offer Developer APIs to Your Partners and Customers
One strategy for enterprises looking to monetize their data and services is to offer an Application Programming Interface (API). This strategy has been used successfully in a range of companies, in industries including travel and – surprisingly, perhaps – banking. AWS offers a number of tools that can help not just in creating and operating […]
Security at AWS
When meeting with security, risk, and compliance executives who have yet to start their cloud transformation or who already have multiple cloud workloads in AWS, I am often asked a version of the following question: “While we agree that the cloud is the new normal, it is different than running security on premise in the […]
Yes, You Should Modernize Your Mainframe with the Cloud
Many of our large enterprise customers have this worry hanging over their heads … what are they going to do about that mainframe when they migrate? Workloads designed specifically for the cloud tend to focus on horizontal scalability – that is, as they need more and more processing power, they can add compute instances to […]
A New Series: Digital Transformation for CFOs and Finance Departments
Today’s digital transformations pose a number of challenges, or certainly major changes, for finance professionals in enterprises. Yet finance is a critical player in these transformations and in the “transformed” enterprise. Enterprises must make decisions about what IT and digital capabilities to invest in, how to fund and account for those capabilities, how to budget […]
The Great Cloud Refactoring Debate
This post is the first in a multi-part series on how enterprises balance refactoring desires against time to value in cloud migrations. With cloud adoption becoming the new normal for the enterprise, the next-level debate is now about the specific approach to take when migrating to the cloud. While it is usually not difficult to […]