AWS Executive in Residence Blog
Author: Mark Schwartz
Mark Schwartz is an Enterprise Strategist at Amazon Web Services and the author of The Art of Business Value and A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility. Before joining AWS he was the CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Service (part of the Department of Homeland Security), CIO of Intrax, and CEO of Auctiva. He has an MBA from Wharton, a BS in Computer Science from Yale, and an MA in Philosophy from Yale.
Rightsizing Infrastructure Can Cut Costs 36%
When an enterprise migrates into the cloud, it is empowered with many new ways to manage its costs. One important benefit is increased agility which in turn leads to leaner delivery processes with corresponding savings. With agility comes the possibility for rapid feedback-and-adjustment cycles, from which comes improved quality and a lower cost of rework. […]
Training the Entire Enterprise to Harness the Cloud’s Full Value
The cloud changes not just how enterprises deliver IT capabilities, but how they compete, how they advance their top lines, how they foster innovation, and how they organize themselves for success. It stands to reason, then, that training for the cloud should extend not just to technical employees, but to the entire organization as well. […]
Lowering the Cost of Curiosity
In his post on the AWS Public Sector blog, John Brady, the CISO of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), talks about building a data lake in the cloud to reduce the cost of curiosity. The concept is brilliant and consistent with the way I like to think about agility and innovation: that reducing the […]
Cloud-Based Agility in Responding to Disasters
When we talk about enterprise agility in the cloud, we’re often talking about achieving it through DevOps or other Agile software delivery approaches — about the ability to quickly provision infrastructure, load it up with deployed software, receive fast feedback from users, and scale up and scale down instantaneously. But software agility is only one type of […]
Why the Commercial Sector Should Learn From Government IT (And Not Vice Versa)
Before I joined AWS several months ago, I was the CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), one of the 15 operational component agencies of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). It was my first and only foray into government — prior to that role, I had been a CIO and CEO of commercial-sector companies. How […]