AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog

Category: Enterprise Strategy

Making Artificial Intelligence Real

“We need to be an AI-enabled company.” Replace the “AI” with any technology from history and this comment becomes a common refrain across businesses lured by the promises of new technology and fuelled by FOMO (a fear of missing out). As enterprise strategists and former CXOs who have lived through many “technology is the solution, […]

Reexamining Business Agility through the Lens of COVID-19

This guest post by Aaron Rallo touches on a topic that comes up frequently in my executive conversations and in my books: What is the value of agility and how can you assess it? Clearly, agility (flexibility, nimbleness, whatever word you prefer) has business value, since an agile business has less risk and the potential […]

The CIO-CFO Conversation: Capturing the State of IT

It’s important for CIOs to be able to convey the current state of IT, particularly in conversations with their CFOs. I’ve written before about the CIO-CFO dialogue and how it should change in the digital age. In the past, CIO-CFO conversations have generally focused on budget planning and execution, or on multiyear capital planning. But […]

3 Keys to Innovation in Insurance

There’s a path to digital transformation for companies in every industry, including those that have strong traditions and are highly risk-averse. In this blog post, John Lucking, AWS Principal Solutions Architect, looks at the insurance industry. —Mark Guest post by By John Lucking, AWS Principal Solutions Architect In risk-averse industries like insurance, customers frequently ask […]

Reimagining Your Business Model: How to Leverage Platforms and Marketplaces

In this guest post, Doug Smith, AWS Americas Advisory Shared Delivery Practice Leader, and Prasad MK, Senior Advisory Consultant, talk about using the cloud to support platform and ecosystem models. As enterprises consider the new business models and strategies available to them in the cloud, many should consider these an option; platform and ecosystems have […]

The CISO Perspective: How Chief Information Security Officers “Cross the River” to Cloud Adoption

In this guest post, Mignona Cote, the AWS Global Security Advisory lead, reports on her conversation with Jim Routh, Head of Enterprise Cybersecurity at MassMutual. Their discussion covers the challenges for CISOs who straddle the worlds of traditional information security and newer, digital. DevSecOps and cloud-based security paradigms. Ultimately, Routh says, CISOs must learn to […]

Illustration of people pulling a large weight uphill labelled "Technical Debt"

The CIO-CFO Conversation: Technical Debt—An Apt Term?

Sometimes we technologists can be a bit too clever for our own good. The term technical debt, attributed to Ward Cunningham in a 1992 OOPSLA conference speech¹, may be an example. We use the term often these days, generally in the context of justifying investments in nonfunctional aspects of IT; that is, investments intended to […]

Video Screenshot of Interview Between Steve Schmidt, CISO, AWS and Emma Smith, Global Cyber Security Director, Vodafone

Building an Effective Security Team: It’s More Than Just Technical Skills

As part of a new video series of discussions with security leaders, Verified: Presented by AWS re:Inforce, AWS CISO Steve Schmidt sat down with Emma Smith, Global Cyber Security Director at Vodafone, for a discussion on the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in security teams. Watch the full video on YouTube. Emma, a Diversity […]

Screenshot of video with Steve Schmidt and Jason Chan

The CISOs of Netflix and AWS Discuss Remote Work, Security Culture, and Cats as a Threat Model

As part of Verified: Presented by AWS re:Inforce, a new video series of discussions with security leaders, AWS CISO Steve Schmidt sat down with Jason Chan, VP of Information Security at Netflix, for a broad-ranging interview. Even though we couldn’t be together this year at AWS re:Inforce, we still wanted to create a platform for […]

A diagram showing five capabilities and two characteristics that all agile organizations have in common

The Seven S’s of Organizational Agility

We talk a lot about organizational agility. But what exactly does the term mean? By now, Agile software development and agile IT capability delivery have taken on a fairly precise meaning, even if it’s sometimes misunderstood. But one goal of IT agility is to support organizational agility, which is certainly a broader concept and more […]