Author: Mark Schwartz

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 […]

Most large IT organizations, at some point, have to make decisions about what to centralize and what to decentralize. Some organizations decide to create a shared services group; others look to centralize governance over security and architecture, or to centralize procurement and financial management. When done poorly, the centralized functions can become frustrating bottlenecks, and […]

Business Cases for Cloud Migration I’ve seen some companies struggle to assemble and vet a business case for the cloud. Intuitively, they know the investment is solid. But they get bogged down in projecting their infrastructure needs and have difficulty connecting their cloud activities to broader returns on investment across the enterprise. Fortunately, there’s a […]

In this guest post John Naylon, AWS Principal SA for Telecoms, talks about path dependence—the idea that solutions are sometimes subject to historical accident—and why the AWS notion of “reinvention” in the cloud is a possible solution. While his examples are drawn from the telecom industry, the point is an important one for all of […]