AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog

“You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step” ~Martin Luther King Jr. Most of the time enterprises have little trouble identifying which problems and opportunities to focus on but then succumb to analysis paralysis. The key question, which I have faced in the past as a CTO and now hear […]

Sometimes I think IT leaders are missing a key point in the way they speak to their non-technology counterparts. Case in point: we keep saying things like, “The company has to be more comfortable taking risks,” or “We have to fail fast,” or “We need to be less risk-averse.” I can guarantee that none of […]

by Sid Arora, Sr. Product Manager, AWS Managed Services and Vieng Soukhavong, Global Head of Operations for AWS Managed Services introduction by Mark Schwartz, Enterprise Strategist Our Amazon Managed Services (AMS) group operates customer workloads in the cloud. It has learned a great deal from doing so and has devised innovative solutions for achieving high levels of reliability […]

The roles of the CFO and CIO have been subtly changing. In many enterprises, these roles had veered away from the strategic focus that one would expect from CXOs. But to succeed in the digital world, as I discuss in my book War & Peace & IT, enterprises must let their CIOs and CFOs re-establish […]

I have the privilege of speaking to hundreds of customers a year to talk about how AWS can help their businesses deliver more value to their customers, become more agile, and create innovations that delight in this digital age. However, occasionally I’ll hear statements like, “What if AWS goes away?” “What if AWS decides to […]

by Barb Malik, Principal Tech Delivery Manager, AWS Managed Services Introduction by Mark Schwartz Lift and Shift? Or refactor as you shift? This question comes up often in our conversations with enterprise leaders. To make the most of the cloud, legacy applications would need to be updated to take advantage of the cloud’s unique capabilities—become […]

In my previous post I talked about the presumed challenge of the “frozen middle”—the middle managers who seem to resist transformation even when both the leaders of the organization and the hands-on executors want to see it happen. In that post I discussed the changing role of middle management and the critical role middle managers […]

There’s a disturbing trend in business today of shorter and shorter company lifespans: the average tenure of an S&P company today is a mere 15 years, compared to 67 years in the 1920s.1 Moreover, in the last 20 years the number of domestic companies on the US Stock Exchange has dropped by half.2 While there are a […]

Many enterprises are faced with digital transformation and, according to a McKinsey study, 90% of CEOs believe their industry will be digitally disrupted but only 15% feel well positioned to execute on a high frequency digital strategy. The cloud provides the ability to automate testing, security, and infrastructure, in addition to offering a pay as […]

First in a two-part series In many of our conversations with customers, we hear talk of a “frozen middle”—middle managers in IT who are reluctant to change and either block or slow down attempts at transformation. The idea is that senior leadership wants to gain the benefits of the cloud and digital transformation while line […]