Member Article

Is cloud the new normal?

Mark Jackson is Sales Manager at Perfect Image. After returning from the Re:invent 2015 Amazon Web Services conference in Las Vegas, he questions whether cloud computing is the new normal and shares some insights into what new products people can expect from true cloud computing and how it can benefit your business.

Is cloud the new normal when it comes to a business’ choice of IT infrastructure? If you believe Andy Jassey, Senior VP of Amazon Web Services (AWS), this is not only true in the US but it’s true in the UK and Europe as well. As an opening keynote statement at Re:invent 2015, the global gathering for all things cloud held in Las Vegas, this opening line was followed with a few other snippets that certainly grabbed my attention as well as the other 20,000 or so delegates in front of him.

For me the real headliners were that AWS is now a $7bn business in its own right and is the fastest growing enterprise IT business in the world, with some of the services it offers growing by over 100% in the past year alone. Even more staggering, as AWS continues to grow at this scale, they are actually reducing costs so much so that the rest of the industry is struggling to keep up - both Microsoft and IBM announced losses in profits year on year.

So on that basis, it seems certain that true cloud computing through AWS is not only here to stay but it is now the mainstay for businesses and organisations who need efficient, low cost computing – it’s something any IT professional simply can’t ignore. In other words, when a CTO in a large business comes to present a hardware refresh to the decision makers, if cloud computing isn’t listed as one of the options, eye brows will be raised. Basically, cloud computing is fast becoming the new normal for business.

But it doesn’t end there. Yet again throughout the four days of the conference, the first being for partners like Perfect Image, we were given demonstrations of a new suite of products and services that are coming online through AWS. Happily for us, we’d already had a sneak preview of a few and had been able to give direct initial feedback to the product managers - another reason why the choice of AWS for us and our customers continues to be the right one.

Some of the stand-out production mentions are AWS QuickSight. This is a low cost business intelligence tool that provides highly visual data analysis in the cloud. Data can be aggregated from any visible database and is then displayed for dashboard-style consumption by a varied audience depending on job role. Since Perfect Image is a major player in the BI space, for us this is a perfect evolution of our existing BI offering.

Next up there’s Amazon IoT. The Internet of Things is real and here, and we’re not talking about fridges that order milk for you (just yet!). These are real world applications and AWS has a dedicated service to support the billions of devices and trillions of messages sent by ‘things’ such as wind turbines or high tech farming machinery being used worldwide to collate, process and determine data trends to satisfy our ever increasing demands for meaningful information.

So what does this mean for Perfect Image and more importantly our customers as we discuss the business benefits of true cloud computing through AWS cloud with them? In the main, all of these items roll into an already robust argument that cloud is the new normal. It’s low cost, highly flexible, scalable and can be delivered extremely quickly. For more high tech businesses, these services help accelerate global expansion in weeks not years. In our discussions with clients and other stakeholders, it’s the technology that is now driving strategic growth, simply because it can!

True cloud, combined with our highly skilled networking and support teams, means we can ensure that our customers have robust, cost effective and flexible infrastructure that’s supported by dedicated, friendly people.

For more information about Perfect Image, visit: http://www.perfect-image.co.uk/

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Perfect Image .