The news from Amazon follows the trend of AWS being a major driver of Amazon’s continued revenue growth and competitors are taking note.
To understand more, Digital Journal spoke with AWS expert, Tim Varma, Global Director of Project Management at Syntax (a managed-cloud provider for mission-critical applications and AWS partner). Kelly discusses what this move means for existing AWS customers as well as how competitors like Microsoft and Oracle will respond to this announcement.
Digital Journal: How important is cloud computing for businesses?
Tim Varma: Cloud computing is extremely important, if not a must, for businesses. The fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) of the public cloud has dramatically diminished over time. Businesses today depend on the public cloud as well as SaaS-based solutions like Office 365, Salesforce and ServiceNow to deliver their internal user and customer experiences safely and quickly. Businesses that choose not to adopt the public cloud will not be able to maintain the flexibility and agility needed today.
DJ: Does cloud computing benefit every sector?
Varma: Cloud computing absolutely benefits every sector. With the incredible amount of innovation and compute options available, there are no sectors that cannot benefit from public cloud in some form or fashion; there will only be outliers, based on legacy technologies. However, these companies also will be or already are exploring which workloads work best in the cloud. Additionally, compliance, security and latency have traditionally been key deciding factors in certain sectors not adopting public clouds. But these concerns are continuously mitigated by the amount of compliance-based certifications, the extreme focus on security and the ever-increasing network capacities that have been deployed.
DJ: Why have some data breaches with cloud systems have occurred recently?
Varma: Where there is data, there will always be the risk of breaches regardless of whether it involves public cloud, private cloud or on-premise systems. With a public cloud like AWS, a well architected framework is paramount. Security practices and reference architectures have been defined and shared so others can follow them. As with all systems, securing, maintaining, routinely updating and monitoring them at every layer is key.
DJ: What is the new addition of the AWS Data Exchange?
Varma: AWS Data Exchange easily allows companies to share extremely large data sets on AWS through Marketplace, both free and paid for. Once a company subscribes to a dataset, it can transfer the dataset to its own S3 bucket quickly and easily, regardless of geographic region. Additionally, as these large datasets are updated, they can be automatically refreshed to the subscriber.
DJ: What does this mean for existing AWS customers?
Varma: As more data providers emerge, millions of AWS customers will have access to these datasets. The speed of accessing and using the data will rapidly accelerate the ability of customers to evolve.
DJ: What will be the impact on the likes of Microsoft and Oracle?
Varma: I anticipate that Microsoft and Oracle will follow suit with similar offerings of their own. This is all good news for businesses that subscribe to cloud services and it shows the innovation availability of new offerings in the cloud. These types of offerings also prove how quickly the public cloud providers, especially AWS, go to market quickly to provide invaluable services to their customers.
