SINGAPORE – Cloud has become the new normal as it enables the transformation of virtually every industry. This is according to Markku Lepisto, principal technology evangelist, APAC of Amazon Web Services (AWS), who stressed that “cloud is now used to disrupt traditional industries.”
“In the olden days, companies had to spend millions for inflexible infrastructure,” Markku Lespisto said. “But now, cloud is pay-as-you-go… it is not frozen in time.”
Spotify, for instance, continues to change the music industry; just as Airbnb continues to affect the hotel industry; and DropBox affects data saving/sharing. These global companies use AWS, with Lepisto saying that not surprisingly, “many now use mission-critical services of AWS cloud – from start-ups to major corporations to public sector.”
The move of companies to cloud is not surprising, if not inevitable, said Lepisto, because of the benefits that cloud affords those who go into it.
“In the olden days, companies had to spend millions for inflexible infrastructure,” Lepisto said. “But now, cloud is pay-as-you-go… it is not frozen in time.”
Cloud benefits include: the removal of upfront capital expenditure (CapEx); significant lower costs/lower variable expense; removal of the need to guess capacity [“When you launch a product, you don’t immediately know the customers you will be serving. In the old days, you… (may not have) have the capacity to serve the customers. Now with cloud, you have virtually unlimited capacity,” Lepisto said]; increase in speed and agility; removal of the need to spend money on undifferentiated heavy lifting; and the ability to go global.
With AWS’s cloud offerings, for instance, “we take care of all of that so (that our) customers can focus on customer service. They should be able to work at service level,” Lepisto said. “We are a customer-obsessed company; we listen to what’s needed.”
The move to cloud also benefits its further development.
AWS, for instance, only had 24 significant features or services when it started; and the features, updates and services grew to 516 by 2014, highlighting the “rapid pace of innovation,” Lepisto said.
Similarly due to the adoption of cloud, pricing has become more competitive – AWS, for instance, had 48 price reductions since 2006.
AWS was launched in 2006 to provide a featured technology infrastructure platform in the cloud. The company has more than 40 services to support any cloud workload today, from enterprise applications, platform services, administration and security, infrastructure, technology and business support, and core services (computing, storage, databases and networking). With data center locations in the US, Brazil, Germany, Japan, and Ireland, it now has over one million customers, from startups, large enterprises, and government agencies across 190 countries. In Asia and the Pacific, and Oceania regions, it has data center locations in Australia, China and Singapore.
For more information about AWS, visit http://aws.amazon.com.
