AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog

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 […]

Larry’s pet cat sits on his office desk

Reimagining Work for the Post-pandemic World  

Larry Augustin, VP of Applications at AWS, shares how organizations are reimagining their post-pandemic workforces as part of a new blog series, Reimagining the Workforce. Eating lunch with a colleague, brainstorming around a whiteboard, kicking off a new project with a full room’s energy, celebrating a significant accomplishment together—these are some of the things I […]

A whiteboard with diagrams of various enterprise integration options

Buy vs. Build Revisited, Part 3: From Having Bought to Going to Build

In my third installment on digging deeper into deciding between buying software and building it in house, I want to describe how organizations can transition from a “mostly bought” environment to one where they can productively build bespoke solutions. As an industry we are mildly guilty of repeatedly showing great target pictures but then falling […]

Four Anti-patterns When Establishing Centres of Excellence

In most organizations, the bottleneck is at the top of the bottle. —Peter Drucker   Should technology be centralised or decentralised in an organisation? An easy question to ask, and one where leaders can talk themselves into believing there is a simple solution to a normally messy problem. If you accept that organisations are complex […]

Diagram of organization models

Organising for Data

Best practices usually aren’t. —Peter Thiel, Entrepreneur   I generally dislike the phrase best practice. It implies that a single truth has been discovered for something which cannot be improved upon. It engenders a complacency that, once the practice is implemented, thinking and innovation can stop. This goes for organisational models too.  Business cases that […]