Utilising the power of cloud computing and digital technology to stay ahead of the competition has become more important than ever in the pandemic era, the CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS) has declared.
Speaking at the opening keynote of the company’s AWS re:Invent 2020 digital conference, Andy Jassy said that embracing technology to constantly reinvent a business could be the key between success and failure.
“You want to be reinventing all the time,” Jassy said in his keynote. “Some of it is building the right reinvention culture, and some of it is knowing what technology is available to you and jumping on it to make that reinvention happen.”
“Early days for cloud”
AWS has once again seen incredible growth, with the company seeing a significant boost from companies switching to remote working during the pandemic. Jassy revealed 29% year-on-year growth for AWS compared to the 2019, highlighting that the company has around 45% of the total global cloud market.
But he noted that it is “still early days for cloud”, which makes up only 4% of total IT spend, as on-premise systems continue to take precedence – for the time being at least.
This is set to change massively in the next few years, however, with Jassy highlighting how the pandemic has helped push companies towards the cloud due to the efficiency and cost-saving advantages the technology offers.
“In the short term – in the first nine months or 10 months of this thing – virtually every company in the world, including Amazon, has tried to save money any way that they can,” Jassy said. “But what we’ve seen – and this happens a lot of times when you have a period of discontinuity like a pandemic – is that companies take a step back, and they rethink what they’re doing and what they want to stop doing.”
“One of the things that we’ve seen is that enterprises that we’ve been talking with for many years about moving to the cloud, where there’s a lot of discussion and dipping the toes in the water, but not real movement, so many of those enterprises have gone from talking to having a real plan. And that, I think, is going to be one of the biggest changes you see.”
“I think when you look back on the history of the cloud, it will turn out that the pandemic accelerated cloud adoption by several years.”
And it seems like the majority of this adoption will be in hybrid cloud, which appears to be the main focus for AWS in the next few quarters. Jassy did not mention multicloud at all in his keynote, but focused heavily on the company’s hybrid offerings moving forward.
“When you think about the term hybrid and hybrid infrastructure, I think a lot of people believe that this term and these solutions are pretty set,” Jassy said.
“In our very strong opinion, both the definition of the term and the solutions themselves are innovating and being reinvented really quickly. When people ask, ‘what’s hybrid?’ typically people view it as a mix of modes, and people defined it early on as a combination of cloud alongside on-premises data centers.”
“…we think of hybrid infrastructure as including the cloud, along with various other edge nodes – on-premises data centers being one of them, but there are several of them. The way that customers have told us they want to consume our hybrid offering is with the same APIs, the same control plane, the same tools and the same hardware that they’re used to using in AWS regions. Effectively, they want us to distribute AWS to these various edge nodes.”
“So we reimagined for ourselves what hybrid was, and we started to build solutions that ticked off the biggest use cases, but in a way that worked for customers, both short and long term.”
With such strong continued growth, solid customer wins, and a global workforce increasingly migrating away from offices and towards remote connectivity, the smart money would definitely be on AWS keeping this momentum going for some time yet.
