Unleashing the Power of the Cloud with the AWS Cloud Value Framework (CVF) – Business Agility (5/7)

Pillar 4: Business Agility

Introduction

This blog is part of a series on the AWS Cloud Value Framework (CVF). The CVF serves as a comprehensive guide to help businesses to evaluate, quantify, and communicate the value of AWS Cloud adoption. It comprises five pillars with this blog focused on Pillar 4: Business Agility.

Figure 1: The AWS Cloud Value Framework

In this blog, we will explain:

• The Business Agility pillar
• The benefits that organizations have been able to achieve
• How organizations were able to use AWS to achieve these benefits
• Examples and case studies
• How to demonstrate the value for your own migration

Pillar 4: Business Agility

The cloud facilitates rapid experimentation, scalability, and elasticity. AWS helps businesses to deploy resources in minutes, experiment with new ideas quickly, and scale up or down based on demand. This enhanced business agility helps organizations to respond rapidly to market changes and innovate faster, ultimately leading to increased customer satisfaction and business growth.

The Hackett Group published The Business Value of Migration to Amazon Web Services and the study measured agility improvements across four KPIs:

Table 1: Agility improvements achieved from migrating to AWS. Table source: Hackett Group, The Business Value of Migration to Amazon Web Services

Through migrating workloads to the cloud, AWS helps business agility in several key ways:

• Experimentation and Innovation – AWS offers a wide range of services for Analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and IoT. These services help organizations to experiment with new technologies and innovate rapidly through increasing the speed to derive insights. By using services like Amazon Q, Amazon SageMaker, AWS Glue, and AWS IoT, businesses can extract valuable insights from their data, automate processes, and create new revenue streams. Amazon partnered with AWS to experiment and used ML to reduce 915,000 tons of packaging. Coca-Cola İçecek built a robust digital analytics system for its production-line sanitation, improving process efficiency and reducing environmental resource usage. Refer to Leading Cloud Innovators for business value examples across many industries.
• Faster Time to Market – AWS provides a wide range of managed services and infrastructure components that streamline the development and deployment of applications. Using services like AWS Lambda, Amazon ECS, Amazon Q Developer, and AWS CodePipeline, organizations can accelerate their development cycles. This helps to release new features more frequently, and bring products to market faster. Paytron have been able to use these AWS services to do 20 deployments per day. In addition, organizations like Fanduel have been able to use AWS Outposts to decrease Time To Market for key products. In this case, Fanduel was able to reduce the time to develop a product from conception until release from 15-16 weeks, to less than 20 days.
• Move to Microservices architecture – A microservices based architecture both helps scale applications, while also increasing the speed of development. Microservices help to create a continuous integration and continuous delivery model. This helps you to try new ideas and roll back if something doesn’t work. The low cost of failure helps to increase experimentation, and accelerates time-to-market for new features. Lyft has successfully deployed an architecture with over 100 microservices. This microservices architecture has helped them save infrastructure costs and rapidly scale with the growth of their ridesharing platform.
• Instant Testing of Ideas – Developers can create testing and sandbox environments using On-Demand Instances (Pay As You Go) and resources. Using AWS, you are not stuck with the traditional long procurement or protracted development time in order to test your idea. With instant testing of ideas this can provide you with a competitive edge.
• Scalability – AWS helps businesses to scale their infrastructure based on demand. This elasticity enables organizations to respond directly to changing market conditions or new business opportunities without the need and delay for upfront investments.

On-Demand Infrastructure on AWS Helps Capital One DevOps Teams Move Faster Than Ever
By using AWS, we’ve cut the time needed to build new application infrastructure by more than 99 percent. With the virtually instantaneous infrastructure available on AWS, our DevOps teams have the building blocks they need to start developing any new product as soon as they understand the intent behind it.”

John Andrukonis – Chief Architect, Capital One

• Move to Modern DevOps – DevOps is the combination of culture, practices, and tools that increase an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity. Evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed helps organizations to compete more effectively in the market. AWS supports organizations in adopting DevOps through tooling like AWS Proton. NAB used AWS DevAX::academy to learn the practices.

AWS offers businesses agility by providing scalable and flexible cloud services. This helps companies to adapt to changing demands, innovate faster, and efficiently experiment with new ideas without the need for significant upfront investments in infrastructure. AWS has a broad range of services that help businesses to deploy and scale applications, automate processes, and respond directly to market changes. This helps to provide a competitive edge in today’s fast-paced digital landscape.

Demonstrating Business Value of Business Agility

Calculating the business agility benefits of using AWS involves assessing various factors. This includes time to market, the speed to release features, scalability, flexibility, and the time to experiment and innovate. You can quantify these benefits by analyzing metrics like deployment frequency, digital projects, or lead time for changes. You can also assess the impact of these to your business. Additionally, you can consider qualitative factors like improved innovation, customer satisfaction, and competitive advantage. This can be the hardest benefit to quantify, but it can also deliver the largest benefit with deliver revenue growth.

To develop an initial view of the benefits to your organization, you can use the benchmarks from the Hackett Group. This will help you to see how much other organizations have been able to achieve, and apply the approach to your own data. Not all features might be revenue impacting as they could address operational issues, or assist in improving customer satisfaction or employee productivity. The following Table 2 shows an example for Time to Market for new Application features KPI.

Table 2: Time to market for new Application features using AWS

* Figures are for illustrative purposes only

Additional Support

For additional guidance in demonstrating Business Value, refer to the Cloud Economics Center. Contact your AWS account representative to request a complimentary Cloud Economics assessment.