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AWS Sells on Speed, Not Cost
At the opening of AWS Summit in Toronto, Joshua Burgin emphasized that the main benefit of AWS cloud services is increased speed and agility. This aligns with Info-Tech's framework for evaluating cloud and realizing its benefits.
Although cost savings has often been hailed as a reason to move to the cloud, at the opening keynote address of AWS Summit in Toronto in Oct 2019, AWS Technical Advisor to the SVP Joshua Burgin claimed, "the number one reason customers join AWS is that they get agility and speed."
The cloud, Burgin suggested, is not fundamentally about penny-pinching cost savings, but about increasing throughput and responsiveness of organizations so they can deliver greater value to their customers, faster.
A cloud services platform should provide your organization with new and improved capabilities beyond what you can achieve with your traditional infrastructure environment.
Our Take
Info-Tech's approach to cloud has for some time now focused on a holistic view of cloud benefits based on cloud's essential characteristics, rather than emphasizing simple cost savings, which may or may not materialize.
AWS aligns with this approach.
But organizations moving to the cloud need to remember that the cloud alone is not enough. The AWS platform has many excellent features that serve to enable such capabilities, but to take full advantage of these capabilities and deliver greater value to their customers, organizations need to change their way of working.
The DevOps movement, which is about delivering increased business value to the organization and its customers, really extends beyond Dev and Ops throughout the entire value chain, from the initial business requirements through to the organization's own customers.
To take full advantage of cloud platforms, organizations need to make visible this value chain and continually optimize and improve all elements of the process. They will need to transform their governance, their culture, and their operating model. or risk being left behind.
Organizations will need to tackle these challenges with strong and inspiring leadership, and solid governance that enables metrics-based decision making. It's not just about IT anymore. It's about the end-to-end business process to drive customer value. The cloud is just once piece of this puzzle.