Cloud Economics Center

Understand and optimize the value of AWS

The value of cloud extends beyond Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) reduction. AWS customers also see significant improvements in other areas, including staff productivity, operational resilience and business agility.

Leading organizations understand the value of using AWS is not limited to cost savings. The Cloud Value Framework helps customers understand the business value of moving to and building on AWS.

AWS Cloud Value Framework

Cost Savings (TCO)

What is it?

Infrastructure cost savings/ avoidance from moving to the cloud.

Example

50%+ reduction in TCO.

GE Oil & Gas Case Study »

Staff Productivity

What is it?

Efficiency improvement by function on a task-by-task basis.

Example

Over 500 hours per year of server configuration time saved.

Sage Software Case Study »

Operational Resilience

What is it?

Benefit of improved availability, security, and compliance.

Example

Critical workloads run in multiple AZs and Regions for robust DR.

Expedia Group Case Study »

Business Agility

What is it?

Deploying new features/ applications faster and reducing errors

Example

Launch of new products 75% faster.

Unilever Case Study »

Sustainability

What is it?

Minimizing environmental impact of business operations

Example

Power consumption reduced by 10 megawatts per year.

Capital One Case Study »

Fostering business and organizational transformation to generate business value

IDC interviewed 41 organizations globally and reported that AWS helped customers accelerate growth, drive efficiencies, and realize important long-term cost reductions. Highlights from the 2022 IDC Report on The Business Value of Amazon Web Services include: 

Optimizing Cost of Providing IT Services and AWS Value

Improved IT and Business Agility

Business Operations Impact

10 months

to payback

Nearly 2.3x

more new features delivered

$66.3M

additional revenue per year per organization

47%

more efficient IT infrastructure staff

50%

lower 5-year cost of operations

35%

more productive application development teams

78%

faster deployment of new compute/storage resources

69%

less time lost to unplanned downtime

30%

higher productivity in analytics teams

Business outcomes and benchmarking with AWS

Business leaders wonder if they will see further productivity gains; how secure their more sensitive applications and data will be in the cloud; and how migration will affect increasingly critical agility metrics, such as time to market. Value Benchmarking provides guidance on improvements based on what other AWS customers have achieved.

Read the Business runs better in the cloud whitepaper or download the Business Value of Migrating to AWS infographic

The carbon reduction opportunity of moving to Amazon Web Services

To estimate the environmental benefits for enterprises moving to its public cloud infrastructure, Amazon Web Services commissioned 451 Research, a technology market research and advisory firm, to conduct a study on the energy and carbon efficiency of enterprise data centers and server infrastructure. Study findings show that moving workloads to AWS can help enterprises steeply reduce energy consumption and their carbon footprint compared to their internal operations.

Read the study: US | EMEA | APAC

Learn how customers are realizing business value with AWS

Kmart Australia is a leading retailer operating more than 400+ stores in Australia and New Zealand, with more than 85% of Australians shopping at Kmart each year. Brad Blyth, Chief Information Officer, engaged AWS Cloud Economics to highlight the value realized by Kmart’s cloud transformation. Through this transformation on AWS, Kmart can experiment faster, enjoy better performance, and release features and enhancements more quickly to improve its customers’ experiences. This whitepaper also outlines the business value that Kmart Group derived across FIVE pillars of the AWS Cloud Value Framework including costs savings, staff productivity, operational resilience, business agility and sustainability.

TrueBlue is a global provider of specialized workforce solutions, including staffing, workforce management, and recruitment process outsourcing. With 6,700 employees and $1.6 billion in revenue, TrueBlue helped connect approximately 490,000 people to work in 2020. Jeff Dirks, Chief Technology and Information Office, engaged with AWS Cloud Economics to quantify the business value TrueBlue achieved through its digital transformation. Using AWS, TrueBlue is driving innovation to reinvent staffing solutions, changing the way people connect to work, and helping customers find talent faster.

Discovery, Inc., is a leader in nonfiction media, operating in 220 countries and territories, and delivering over 8,000 hours of original programming each year. Dave Duvall, Chief Information Officer, worked with the AWS Cloud Economics team to understand the value achieved by migrating its playout infrastructure to AWS. As a result, Discovery can deploy new channels faster, focus on growth and innovation, and pivot to meet the needs of an evolving market.

The value of improved availability, security, and performance

Nucleus studied enterprise organizations’ journey to the cloud with AWS to understand how moving applications from an on-premises to public cloud environment affects the security, performance, and availability of those applications. Nucleus interviewed executives and development team leaders from 33 global enterprises spanning a wide range of industries who migrated a collective 351 applications from onpremises environments to the AWS cloud. Highlights include a 64% reduction in mean time to resolution (MTTR), 40% reduction in IT costs, 69% reduction in unplanned downtime, and 43% decrease in security events.

Learn more »

Cloud Financial Management at AWS

Cloud Financial Management (CFM) is a set of activities enabling Finance and Technology organizations to manage, optimize and predict costs as they run more workloads on AWS. A disciplined CFM approach enables the right balance between agility and control, while improving unit economics.

Learn more about Cloud Financial Management »

Customer success

Learn about how our customers are using AWS services to power innovation.

Australia Finance Group (AFG) reduced annual IT operational spend by AU$500,000, while shifting from consuming 80% of IT expenditure on IT operational costs to 60% dedicated to innovation.

Trainline migrated all workloads to AWS and reduced downtime by 60% with an annual savings of £1.2M.

CapitalOne reduced its data centers from eight to three by 2018 and reduced the time needed to build new application infrastructure by more than 99%.

In three months, Conde Nast migrated over 500 servers, one petabyte of storage and over 100 database servers into the AWS Cloud. As a result of going all-in into the AWS Cloud, the company reduced costs by 40% and increased operational performance by 30-40%.

Lionsgate avoided acquiring additional data center space, saving an estimated $1M+ over three years.

King County in Washington State saved $1M in hardware refresh costs and $200k annually in OPEX costs.

By using AWS, Enel reduced provisioning time reduced from four weeks to two days.

UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute used AWS to process 20,000 cancer samples in days instead of months, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars and powering innovative new research.

Bringing your other IT investments to AWS

AWS helps customers unlock the value of their IT investments as they move to the cloud. Unlike some software vendors who use restrictive licensing terms to force cloud customers to use dedicated hardware, or change their terms to break previously supported use cases, AWS partners with our customers to help them navigate their path to the cloud by gaining a deep understanding of their business needs.

AWS delivers customer value through innovative features, low prices, and fair terms. Ninety percent of the services and features we deliver come directly from customer input. We provide tools to help customers optimize their cloud investments, without accruing additional costs, while cutting our own prices more than 100 times. We offer specialists to help with cost analysis, database migration, and moving from proprietary software like Oracle Database, SQL Server, and Windows to more flexible and cost effective open source alternatives. Finally, AWS makes it easy to see how on-premises software can run more cost effectively on AWS than other clouds and keeps business decisions firmly in the hands of the customer.