Cost efficiencies, increased productivity and innovation are commonly cited as priorities driving cloud adoption. For startups trying to make their way and compete, these are all important, with innovation being critical to serious attempts at disrupting their market. In part two of our Startup Masterclass with Gaurav Arora, Head of Start-up Ecosystem, APAC for AWS, we explore questions about efficiency and innovation and the AWS Cloud.

GA: It's not only cost-cutting and efficiency measures that are moving startups to the cloud. It’s also about the agility that cloud provides to drive innovation and create fundamental change in the way businesses operate – what products they sell, to whom, and the way in which they market it all.

At AWS, we are quite bullish about the startup ecosystem. From our perspective, AWS has enabled startups to experiment more – with minimal collateral damage from unsuccessful attempts. Startups can “fail forward, fail faster, fail cheaper” with AWS, and more quickly find their path so success. They can “startup small, think big and scale fast”. This has fundamentally accelerated the pace of innovation not just amongst startups but also enterprises. 

GA: There have been quite a few innovative ideas in the field of Wearables, FinTech, IoT, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and even Robots and Virtual Assistants. For example, there is one startup that we are working closely with, which is trying to turn Alexa-enabled bank tellers into a reality. So, you may soon walk into a bank branch or use an ATM and be greeted by Alexa based voice or Virtual Assistant.

AWS is also enabling startups to unleash innovation at unprecedent scale, which they were not able to do before. Case in point is Momo, a Vietnamese mobile payment start-up, which uses AWS to perform data analytics at scale and from many different sources. Its offers more than 100 services for 1 million active users and 4,000 point-of-sale locations. They were not able to achieve this scale with their previous on-premise infrastructure. Similarly, ShareChat, an Indian social network uses AWS to reliably scale their mobile app backend for millions of users. The AWS platform has enabled them to scale to millions of invocations easily, during peaks of 150 million/day with error rate of 0.0002 percent, while being highly fault tolerant. This resulted in improved product development speed as it allows them to completely focus on writing application code.

GA: Some of the staff challenges will centre around security of their roles in the business and their value to the company. They might be thinking: Will these new cloud services replace us, take our jobs?

Business leaders need to help them see that, while change is coming, they will still be needed in conjunction with new skills. In fact, adopting cloud platform will allow them to implement innovative ideas and new channels of revenue without worrying too much about managing the backend infrastructure and associated cost.

GA: Sometimes you will have a failure, and that’s how you learn. AWS has many services that can simply be turned on, used and scaled as required. When you have services such as AI, speech and image recognition, big data analytics, machine learning and business insights at your fingertips, then innovative experimentation becomes pretty cheap as do managing any ensuing failures. Innovators leveraging the AWS Cloud the right way can afford to be risk-taking experimenters – to use the cloud to test new ideas and not be too concerned about ROI. These innovators can build a new type of organisation and work towards setting ambitious new goals.

The important thing for startups is that the business should not falter on the basics of backend infrastructure, and this can be avoided through using training on AWS to get better knowledge and learn best practices. So, fail on experimentation with innovation, but don’t fail on the basics of using AWS services.

GA: AWS Certification and additional training on best practices, as well as following successful use cases from other companies in their verticals, will give startups a benchmark as to what services might best suit them. This can also help startups understand how to architect their solutions, and Training and Certification on AWS will give staff the knowledge they need to successfully implement solutions. They can also leverage AWS Solution Architects to get recommendations and insights into services.

GA: Cloud has become the new normal, as companies of every size are now deploying new applications to the cloud by default, and looking to migrate as many of their existing applications as they can as quickly as possible.

It has never been easier or more cost-effective to mine data and create insights. The other interesting trend is that security in the cloud is now being recognized as better than on-premises. We continue to make security in the cloud even more robust, and are adding features that were not even possible on-premises. AWS Training provides comprehensive courses on security, plus the AWS Certified Security - Specialty Certification for those who really want to become security experts.

There is huge potential for startups to innovate using the AWS Cloud. But as we touched on today, taking on innovation isn’t always a straight and easy road. In part three of our Startup Masterclass with Gaurav, we’ll look at a few of the common pitfalls startups can avoid.

To learn more, get started with free digital training from AWS.