Businesses are being challenged to meet new customer expectations influenced by consumer centric applications powered by cloud services. It is important to understand the value of cloud services for enterprises while embarking on the digital transformation journey.
IDC interviewed ten organizations from a cross section of industries using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to measure how AWS impacts their business operations and IT environments. These organizations are capturing substantial business value by making their operations more efficient and cost-effective, and by better serving their customers with accelerated solution delivery. On average, IDC calculates that these Amazon customers will capture five-year business benefits worth over $1.5 million per application they are running in the AWS environment, and earn a return on their investment in AWS of 560%. They will achieve this value because AWS:
» Supports expanding application environments at a much lower cost than an on-premise or hosted environment » Requires less time to manage, administer and update » Provides agility, scalability, and improved performance to better address business opportunities and enhance user productivity » Reduces risk and minimizes the frequency of application downtime
On the whole, interviews with AWS customers demonstrated that they are not only leveraging Amazon cloud services to build and support applications more efficiently and cost effectively, but that running these applications in the AWS environment is enabling them to better serve their customers and drive their business transformation initiatives.
Business Challenges Today
Business processes are quickly made obsolete by technology that evolves with continuous improvement. As a result, businesses that fail to take advantage of technological innovation often struggle to maintain their competitive advantage since technology innovation and competitiveness are increasingly tightly linked. By taking advantage of cloud services, organizations can increase agility, while decreasing their cost and risk. In order to surpass competition, today’s CEO has to handle the complex task of digitally transforming the entire organization at a much faster pace than any time before. With the advent of cloud computing, automation through information technology is at the forefront in helping corporations make this transition successful.
Financial Benefits Analysis
Surveyed organizations are using AWS because they concluded it offered them the best combination of business agility, ease of application development, cost, security, stability, and efficiencies in use and management. One AWS customer explained: “We moved to the cloud and chose a provider based on security, use of internal resources, and driving innovation. We chose Amazon because we believed they were the best of breed, and we believe they still are.”
Business Productivity Benefits
AWS customers interviewed for this study have leveraged AWS to improve their operations and business outcomes. They credited AWS with providing them the agility, scalability, reliability, and confidence needed to create and address business opportunities, and better serve their customers. In addition, improved performance of important workloads and applications – including cloud, analytics, and mobile workloads - means that their employees have become more productive. Improved performance results in higher employee productivity, more satisfied customers, and higher revenue.
IT Infrastructure Cost Reductions
AWS users have leveraged it as a cost effective means of supporting expanding workload and application environments. Across the board, these customers told IDC that they would have spent substantially more – 63.4% more on average - on an annualized basis to use on-premise data centre resources or hosting services to deliver the workloads and applications running in their AWS environments. One Amazon customer explained: “We looked at doing this internally and it would have cost a lot more than AWS, not even close – double or 1.5 times as much as AWS.” Further, AWS is enabling these organizations to limit their capex spending and adopt more opex-focused IT models. This helps organizations avoid costly upfront capital investments and over provisioning, and enables them to better tie IT spending to ongoing business demand for IT services.
Summary & Conclusion
Organizations that adopt cloud are able to be more competitive, increase customer satisfaction, innovate faster, and achieve greater productivity with resources that focus on core business enablement.
Cost savings benefits of cloud computing have been well documented and understood by businesses with a number of proven use cases documenting results. Over the past few years, enterprises implementing business agility initiatives significantly differentiate themselves from competitors. It is important for readers to understand the potential value beyond dollars and cents from the technology. Beyond cost savings, the following benefits observed in the survey are important while justifying cloud computing in an organization:
1. Better out of the box security
2. Upgrades to solutions are more frequent
3. Opportunity to open up new revenue streams
4. Lower downtime resulting in better user satisfaction
5. Improved decision making ability from faster analytics
6. Improved performance
7. Reduced costs 8. Faster innovation and time to market 9. Lower risk of getting locked into one vendor
Furthermore, mobile device growth and the rapid increase of sensors are changing current business environments and providing opportunities to fully digitizing enterprises. To handle huge volumes of information, analytics is important to automate decision making. In this dynamic environment, businesses are challenged to adapt at a very rapid pace. Business agility enabled by cloud computing technology offers the unique ability to address this disruptive shift.
SureSkills & AWS
SureSkills are uniquely placed to provide end to end AWS Services from Training & Consulting right through to Billing and Support. As the only AWS Authorised training partner in Ireland we Educate our clients by delivering accredited and bespoke training courses onsite or at our training centres. Our highly skilled and experienced Consultants are available to Engage with clients through long or short term projects to deliver POC’s and first & second workloads which help you expedite the on boarding process to start realizing the benefits of AWS straight away. For the more advanced requirements our consultants can Design, Architect, Migrate or Build your new applications on AWS. Our blended approach to training and consulting will Enable you to learn from our Consultants while also delivering a specific piece of work.
This approach ensures your management team sees real business value and a return while also growing your internal expertise. To reduce the complexity we can integrate the full AWS lifecycle into a single point of contact and easy billing and credit terms. We have the skilled resources and experience to be agile and deliver the type of engagements that your business requirements dictate. Our Subject Matter Experts & Consultants work with Global Education teams to design & develop education programmes for some the largest IT companies worldwide so you can rest assured you are in safe hands every step of the way.
To ensure your getting the most out of your AWS journey contact one of our Learning Consultants today on 01 240 2262 or email info@SureSkills.com
Source: AWS Whitepapers