AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog

The cloud changes not just how enterprises deliver IT capabilities, but how they compete, how they advance their top lines, how they foster innovation, and how they organize themselves for success. It stands to reason, then, that training for the cloud should extend not just to technical employees, but to the entire organization as well. […]

 “The hardest thing about getting started is getting started.” — Guy Kawasaki Executives are under increasing pressure to deliver Cloud transformation results quickly. Getting fully setup for success should not stop you from getting going, that said, understanding lessons learned from those who have gone before, saves time and money. As an enterprise strategist for Amazon Web Services, […]

In his post on the AWS Public Sector blog, John Brady, the CISO of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), talks about building a data lake in the cloud to reduce the cost of curiosity. The concept is brilliant and consistent with the way I like to think about agility and innovation: that reducing the […]

When we talk about enterprise agility in the cloud, we’re often talking about achieving it through DevOps or other Agile software delivery approaches — about the ability to quickly provision infrastructure, load it up with deployed software, receive fast feedback from users, and scale up and scale down instantaneously. But software agility is only one type of […]

https://www.shutterstock.com/g/mikdam “… Reform the environment and not man; being absolutely confident that if you give man the right environment, he will behave favorably.” — Buckminster Fuller As an enterprise strategist at AWS, I often talk to customers about strategies that will help them move workloads to the cloud. Occasionally, I’ll hear from senior executives who don’t want […]

Before I joined AWS several months ago, I was the CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), one of the 15 operational component agencies of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). It was my first and only foray into government — prior to that role, I had been a CIO and CEO of commercial-sector companies. How […]

Galapagos Islands “It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.” -Charles Darwin We’re constantly inventing and improving at AWS. And, while we currently offer customers more than 90 services (with many, like EC2, also providing a wide variety of sub-choices), the pace of our […]

Automation is good, so long as you know exactly where to put the machine. -Eliyahu Goldratt I’ve spent time with hundreds of IT executives over the past several years, many of whom are in the process of implementing cloud-first operating models in their enterprises. Among the countless things I’ve learned from these conversations, two things are […]

Lessons From the Edmunds.com All-in Migration to AWS The notion of a buddy system has been used for decades in many facets of life, including school, work, and adventure. Whether it’s a college freshman being paired with an upperclassman at orientation, an Air Force pilot and his or her wingman, or your weekend scuba diving partner, […]

3 Reasons You Should Document YourCulture and Hire for Culture Fit “In our early years, we didn’t talk about culture much. We hadn’t documented it all. We just built a business that we wanted to work in. And, that was great. But the real return on culture happened when we started getting more deliberate about it. […]