AWS’ official announcement of their new Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region coincided with their Customer Appreciation Day at The Westin, which saw small, medium, and large-sized enterprises all vouching for the cloud and AWS.
Here are their views of the clear business drivers behind the cloud, as well as benefits gleaned from it:
Benefits of The Cloud
Cost Reduction and Storage Management
Michael Harte, CIO of Commonwealth Bank Australia, told the audience that CBA has shifted a dozen on-premise applications to the cloud, resulting in a huge operational cost reduction as reported by ComputerWorld:
“We’ve halved storage costs, we’ve halved most of our app testing and development cost. We’ve got a wide range of technology functions as a service. We’ve got application development, testing, infrastructure, software and storage.”
“We’ve saved already tens of millions of dollars in the small initiatives that we’ve done. And we’re looking forward to saving hundreds of millions of dollars buying specified services on demand.”
Better Application Performance
Lane Patterson, CTO at Equinix, said that end-users drive changes in IT today, as both businesses and end-user expectations are always increasing. CxO’s want a new business model for consuming IT resources, high end-user satisfaction and adoption, while end-users expect rich application services and quick responsiveness.
The market challenge is then delivering application performance to meet customer expectations. Poor performance slows adoption, lowers user satisfaction, revenue and market share, and makes you less competitive in the marketplace — so cloud is about giving users a high quality experience.
Harte made the same point in his keynote speech, saying another cloud benefit is how it can change the relationship of IT with business partners within an enterprise; “the happiness that you can get from your business partners because you’re delivering services up on demand within minutes or within days rather than within days, months, weeks, that it normally took.”
Scalability
David Smith, Movember’s CTO, said that the AWS cloud gives them the flexibility to scale up and down. During high season (November), their website averages 100 million page views and over 3 million processed payments. At this peak period they need 100 servers to process upwards of 20,000 donations per hour, and almost 2 registrations per second, so high availability and site performance is critical — or it literally costs them thousands of dollars in donations.
However, from December onwards, Movember’s website only needs 2 servers at most, as the rest of the year is spent testing, implementing infrastructure, and preparing for a rollout that begins in September. Smith explained that they didn’t want to spend millions of dollars on an infrastucture that would just sit there for 11 months of the year, so Bulletproof’s managed AWS cloud solution was a perfect solution for them.
The Big Excuse
The number one barrier to cloud adoption is the misconception that data stored “in the cloud” is floating around in cyberspace, completely accessible. However, this could not be further from the truth.
The security debate is exactly the subject touched upon by Harte at his keynote, condemning the excuse as “absolute garbage”:
“The favourite [excuses] I used to hear when I talked to the big household names in infrastructure equipment was, ‘It doesn’t look very secure Michael. You can’t do that. And there’s data sovereignty; you’d want to look very, very carefully at that. And this on-demand pricing — no we just can’t do that we’ve got rules saying specifically we can’t.”
Harte said that Australian businesses haven’t moved fast enough to embrace the cloud, urging the audience to “get in front of the executive committees of your business and talk to them about the ways we can free up spending and make IT a valued partner”.
Harte’s take on barriers to cloud adoption reinforced the message we get across to prospective clients with generic cloud fears — that security, data privacy and availability of data is of paramount importance. That’s why we run the SAVE IT email archiving platform, and AWS is the reason we can offer unlimited archiving and storage at a disruptively low fixed cost per user.
Cloud Email Archiving in Australia
It seems the gap between Australia and the more cloud-friendly nations is slowly closing as people get over their initial fear of cloud computing technology. In fact, Patterson said that Australasia was “the most mature market in cloud adoption within Asia Pacific”.
The announcement of AWS’ new Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region provides even greater peace of mind for those organisations previously tempted by the cloud who want their data stored on Australian shores. Security is not a question in this case as their data centre partner, Equinix, is extremely reputable and was named Datacenter Services Provider of the Year by Frost & Sullivan Australia.
Furthermore, we already have local government and financial services clients whose overriding need for a simple, secure and compliant enterprise email archiving service has led them to the cloud.
To learn more about cloud email archiving, please download our free whitepaper:
Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net
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