AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog

By Levon Stepanian, Cloud Financial Management Specialist, and Chris Hennesey, Enterprise Finance Strategist Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and their finance organizations are no longer just financial record keepers; they are key stakeholders during their organization’s cloud-enabled digital transformation. In the “CFO Series: The Sniff Test?” blog post, Mark Schwartz makes the case that a CFO […]

In this post, John Naylon draws an interesting connection between multi-cloud strategies and outsourcing. I won’t steal his thunder by saying any more! Mark Complexity, interchangeability, and partnership in outsourcing  What do emptying the office wastepaper baskets and manufacturing iPhones have in common? Perhaps not much on first inspection. However, these are both tasks which […]

“The capacity to learn is a gift; the ability to learn is a skill; the willingness to learn is a choice.” —Brian Herbert, Author It’s easy to think of life as linear stages. Where did you go to school? What do you do for a living? What are your retirement plans? These stages are interspersed […]

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 […]

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” —John Quincy Adams I have been privileged to meet executives from every sector, many with the newer title of “CDO.” The “D” usually stands for Digital or Data. Here’s my observation from seeing great CDOs in […]

As Enterprise Strategist at AWS, one of the most common questions I get asked by enterprise leaders is how to close the talent gap within their organizations. That’s because although recruiting and retaining top technical talent has always been a challenge, today the challenge is even greater. The rise of cloud computing has companies globally—across […]

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 […]