This year marks the fourth annual AWS re:Invent conference. Since re:Invent’s inception, we’ve seen AWS shift from supporting mostly startups and test and development workloads to focusing on the world’s largest enterprises migrating critical production applications to the cloud. Over the last few years, the concepts of private and hybrid clouds have formed, attracting large enterprises to AWS. AWS’ flexibility has begun to show its strength as an increasing number of larger companies have started using AWS as part of their IT infrastructure.
As the maker of Cloud Protection Manager, an enterprise-class backup and recovery for Amazon EC2, we at N2W Software experienced this trend by a significant increase in business with enterprise companies over the past year. That’s why we expect to see a heavy focus on AWS adoption by enterprises at this year’s re:Invent. In this article, I will discuss the relationship between enterprises and the public cloud as well as our predictions for this year’s re:Invent conference.
According to a recent study cited on Forbes, 69% of enterprises are expected to heavily invest in moving business functions to the cloud over the next three years. In addition, 32% of enterprises already using cloud computing to streamline their supply chain and this figure is expected to increase to 56% in the next three years. Out of the global enterprise market, 80% of enterprises use a cloud environment in some capacity. However, the interesting question is, which infrastructure is preferred: on-premise private-cloud or public cloud? or perhaps both?
Running Purely on the Public Cloud
Cloud Protection Manager provides an end-to-end backup solution for data and applications running on the AWS public cloud. Because our customers use Amazon EC2, we experience the continuous migration to the cloud on a daily basis and evolve our offering accordingly. Last year marked a turning point in our customer mix, with large enterprises, service integrators, and managed service providers (MSPs) becoming dominant users. Some of these power users not only needed a comprehensive, scalable and highly-resilient solution as part of their AWS deployment, but also asked us to develop certain features to facilitate the migration of complex environments into AWS. To address these needs, we expanded our feature set to meet these enterprise-grade requirements. For example, among these enterprise-driven upgrades are improved disaster recovery capabilities within the AWS cloud, supporting
cross-region and
cross-account backup and recovery. If the changes we see in our user base reflect broader trends – and predicting the future is always a risky business – we are likely to see a surge in enterprise usage of the public cloud for running large-scale production environments.
Last year, it seemed like Amazon was recognizing the private cloud concept and provided means to bridge the gap between the private and public clouds. This year, we expect to see re:Invent filled with announcements about new enterprise-grade features aiming at facilitating the migration of enterprise environments to AWS’ (such as, moving from
NAS to EFS).
We are looking for the introduction of more comprehensive solutions that better meet the needs of modern cloud-centric enterprises. Enterprise use of the public cloud is no longer just about development and testing and has also gone beyond being an extension of the local data center. Following the proven success of modern cloud-native deployments, such as those of Netflix and Airbnb, many traditional enterprises are now turning to the public cloud as their primary location for mission-critical applications.
Final Thoughts
In 2014, Andy Jassy, AWS’ Senior VP, called the cloud the “new normal”. Based on what we’ve seen as a vendor in this market and the current business trends, this year’s new theme at AWS re:Invent should probably be “enterprises’ new normal.” Over the last decade, the public cloud has evolved from virtually nothing into a large-scale, robust IT infrastructure, used as the primary datacenter by millions of innovative companies. In the next phase, we expect enterprise companies to become dominant users of the public cloud, with new, enterprise-driven features being the catalyst for a massive migration. We are excited about this year’s AWS re:Invent and are looking forward to examine our predictions.
We welcome you to leave feedback and come visit us at booth K6 to continue the discussion.]]>
