Role Of AWS In Digital Transformation: Truly A Technology Enabler In Every Vertical
Disrupt yourself or get disrupted. This is the dilemma faced by most business leaders today. They emphasize the need for companies to disrupt their value chain by ‘digitally transforming’ themselves. Why? Of course, to stay competitive. While digital transformation has become a huge buzzword across industries and verticals, does it affect the way we do business? And, chiefly, to what extent is the role of cloud services like AWS in digital transformation processes anyway? Here we are today deliberating how cloud services, especially AWS, helps with digital transformation in every vertical.
AWS Cloud for Digital Transformation: How is it making an impact?
Digital Transformation is the collective set of strategies adopted by enterprises to bring about new digital customer experiences. It does not limit to just that. It could be bringing more agility into business and reducing total cost of ownership too.
Moreover, today, the responsibilities of IT department of an enterprise includes blending digital and physical aspects of the business with customer experiences, and ensure that the new model is improving operational efficiencies and organizational performance. Hence for an enterprise to adopt digital transformation, IT team becomes a strategic level activity instead of being an operational activity.
Given that IT teams have to focus on the strategic aspects of the business by working to create competitive advantages using the code, IT has to stop worrying about some of the traditional operational responsibilities like managing and provisioning of hardware.
Cloud technologies have been rapidly adopted in the digital enterprises because they empower IT teams to provision new application servers and infrastructure on the go. With cloud platforms like AWS, a digital business can commission and de-commission their IT infrastructure in minutes rather than months.
By enabling this agility in IT infrastructure, cloud platforms like AWS relieve the IT teams of the traditional business responsibility of managing the procurement process of hardware and software for the application infrastructure. And by doing so, they can focus on creating core business value through coding. Many forward-looking digital enterprises like Netflix have shifted completely to AWS cloud purely for this reason only.
And for many digital businesses, today, the cloud infrastructure — AWS in particular — is their actual business Infrastructure itself. They access and use Internet-based computing resources as needed, versus having to invest in data centers, servers, and other architecture. This move in itself is a digital transformation! Above all, this brings more agility into business and reduces total cost of ownership.
One of the classic examples is GE Oil & Gas division leveraging AWS . The company understood that digital innovation and digital transformation are paramount to achieve success, as the oil & gas industry is invariably facing a multitude of challenges from competition to legislation, and cost. The company started its digital transformation journey by migrating more than half of its core applications to AWS while achieving a 52 percent reduction in its total cost of ownership.
Big Data, Analytics, and AWS Cloud: A Match Made in Heaven
Many businesses, today, build their business models around the data assets. The data collected from various touch points are swiftly changing the rules of the game for most business verticals. And the emerging business models built around these data assets have one important common factor: they collect, aggregate, and transform data into information which has business value. This is nothing but BigData Analytics.
Plus, BigData Apps require very high-end IT servers with GPUs to run platforms like Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark so that huge volumes of data can be processed at acceptable time frames. Many digital enterprises have turned to AWS cloud to build their data centers instead of commissioning their own dedicated Data Centers.
In such cases, AWS provides complete infrastructure architecture blueprints with preconfigured servers with Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, preconfigured columnar databases to store huge volumes of data such AWS RDS, etc. AWS also provides massive parallel processing capable hosted data warehousing solution called AWS RedShift. These expensive data center tools for BigData analytics can be commissioned and de-commissioned in hours so that the cost is incurred only for hours during the analytics apps are executed.
The bottom line is that AWS in digital transformation, along with BigData tools, reduces the cost of analytics significantly for the digital enterprises.
And, in support of the emerging DevOps movement, AWS provides the complete the DevOps tool-chain. From this, digital enterprises can pull code from code repositories, build the binaries, commission the server components and deploy the code. Hence, AWS Cloud is a true enabler of digital enterprise platform which takes care of all the base architectural layer details and allows the IT teams of a digital enterprise focus on their core value creation of application development.
To Conclude
Innovation, growth, and transformation are the three key elements AWS has been offering to digital enterprises. As technology continues to grow and shift towards more digital disruption, AWS is believed to continue to provide the best access to data and infrastructure and will be central for all enterprises undergoing a digital transformation. That’s a plus and clearly AWS is here to stay! However, there are incessant challenges that loom around it. Share your thoughts with us Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook. and tell us what challenges you’re facing in operating your AWS cloud infrastructure. Also take up a 14-day trial of Botmetric today, and see how it can help with AWS cloud automation.
