AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog
Using a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) to Transform the Entire Enterprise
Large enterprises beginning a transformation journey often find that they already have pockets of transformation that have escaped notice. But why haven’t good practices spread from these isolated corners of the enterprise and transformed the rest of the organization? I think the answer is that transforming the whole of the enterprise requires…well, a large transformation. […]
Analytics Part 1: Why Every Company Has a Big Data Problem
“Raining Data” by Joe Chung (created in Blender) The weekly Excel report comes out and is delivered to your email. As you review it, you see an anomaly in the financial data that you don’t understand, despite the pivot table provided in the report that allows you to drill down to at least some level […]
Rightsizing Infrastructure Can Cut Costs 36%
When an enterprise migrates into the cloud, it is empowered with many new ways to manage its costs. One important benefit is increased agility which in turn leads to leaner delivery processes with corresponding savings. With agility comes the possibility for rapid feedback-and-adjustment cycles, from which comes improved quality and a lower cost of rework. […]
Training the Entire Enterprise to Harness the Cloud’s Full Value
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. […]
12 Steps to Get Started With The Cloud
“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, […]
Lowering the Cost of Curiosity
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 […]
Cloud-Based Agility in Responding to Disasters
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 […]
4 Reasons to Re-Consider Lift-and-Shift to the Cloud
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 […]
Why the Commercial Sector Should Learn From Government IT (And Not Vice Versa)
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 […]
5 Tips for Keeping Pace with AWS’s Innovation
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 […]