Author: Mark Schwartz

How do you know whether you’re successful in your cloud journey and your digital transformation? Or, when you’re planning your digital initiative, what benefits should you expect and how will you see them reflected in the company’s performance? Given the uncertainty and change in today’s business environment, it’s sometimes hard to find a stable baseline […]

Four Steps Toward Digital Government Many of the challenges that governments face in their digital transformations are common in private sector entities as well. But government agencies are constrained in ways that make it more difficult to address those challenges. When I was the CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Department of […]

We’re taught as managers that rigorous analysis and due diligence are a critical part of our jobs. There’s certainly comfort in spending the time to deeply analyze decisions before we make them. I don’t mean to question that received wisdom, just to point out that there’s a trade-off. Good managers need to do “the right […]

Many enterprises have already become proficient with the cloud. They’ve migrated a substantial portion of their workloads, learned the necessary cloud skills, established an aggressive security posture, and developed at least an initial workable operating model. What’s next? How do you build on that foundation to maximize the value of the cloud? Here are some […]

Overview Throughout the year, we write blog posts on whatever topics seem to be most important to the AWS customer executives we speak to. Each of us on the Enterprise Strategy team holds 100-200 customer meetings a year, generally at the most senior executive levels, to try to help with their challenges in digital transformation—cultural […]

“Shadow IT” or “Rogue IT”—I’d venture to say that all IT organizations experience it. It’s tempting for different parts of the business—when they feel that IT isn’t meeting their needs as quickly as they’d like—to find other ways to get things done. The problem is that they might be bypassing important security or availability controls, […]

by Calvin Wu, Business Development Manager, AWS Cloud Economics In his blog post, “Unlocking the Trillion Dollar Value of Cloud,” Mark Schwartz dives deeply into McKinsey Digital’s prediction that there’s $1 trillion of cloud value up for grabs by enterprises prepared to take it. While the McKinsey article clearly laid out the sources of the […]

This new blog post, by John Naylon, Principal Solutions Architect at AWS, focuses on an important category of risk—strategic risks to a company. He shows why agility is so important in addressing those risks, and how balancing opportunities with risks effectively provides companies with a hedge against risks that can’t otherwise be mitigated. –Mark By […]

To be honest, I’ve never liked the distinction between building and buying when it comes to software. Of course you shoud buy rather than build – if, somehow, there’s a third-party product that does exactly what you need, has the same roadmap for future development as your company will require, meets all your security needs, […]

To make the most of the cloud, most organizations need to change processes, governance models, and technical architectures. But that doesn’t mean there’s no value to simply “lifting and shifting” applications, which can be a great first step in the cloud journey. In keeping with agile ways of working, it’s a great idea to manage […]