Also read: Cloud computing; what is it? Ask US consumers

We provide companies of all sizes with infrastructure web services since 2006 enabling them to access a suite of elastic IT infrastructure services as business demands them.

We offer basic technology building blocks as services in categories like storage, computing, databases, deployment and management, content delivery, messaging and monitoring among others. Our customers can choose any combination of services that best meets their needs.

The customer also has the flexibility and choices that they are not locked into a particular operating system, programming language or programming model.

CIOL: What do you think of Indian market in cloud adoption?

Adam: There is fast adoption of AWS cloud in India. Many software developers and start-ups are constantly developing and testing new ideas. AWS enables the talent and businesses to innovate and move faster to accelerate their speed to market.

The early adopters of our offerings are growing fast because we have enabled them to test ideas quickly, innovate fast and reach out to a wider scope of customers across the world to roll out their products or services within a short timeframe. This has definitely given them a competitive edge. Companies in India like redBus, NDTV, Hungama are examples of early adopters of AWS that are growing very successfully and rapidly.
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CIOL: At a time when Indian enterprises/SMEs are seriously looking to adopt cloud services to enhance their productivity, what complexities are they going to face? What are the strategies to overcome the concerns?

Adam: Many of the existing applications of most of the IT players weren’t written to take advantage of the cloud. Some of these have dependencies on other internal applications that need to move to the cloud too before they can function correctly.

CIOs have tough jobs and often have several thousand applications they’re responsible for. They very much feel on the hook for the performance and security of these applications. When there are problems, they’re used to walking down the hall or picking up a phone to go after their own people.  

Also read: ICT can help SMEs to reach out to large mkts

There’s a certain comfort in knowing that you can take some action if there is a problem, and relinquishing that control and ability to take action is understandably hard.

It is also their fear of the unknown and some large players feed this fear to sell expensive private installations that cost massive amount. Neither keeping this infrastructure in its current status quo nor private installations allow companies to enjoy the most powerful benefits of the cloud.

What most large enterprises are doing now is that they are moving more methodically by picking a diverse set of initial applications to learn and understand how to operate in the cloud before migrating more and more of their applications.

In fact, we see many of these enterprises quickly learn and realize the kind of business advantage and flexibility that the cloud brings and they move fast to build a 12 to 24-month migration plan. AWS is doing this with many enterprises in India and across the world now.

CIOL: What innovations can be brought in to the cloud?

Adam: Even though AWS has been in this business for the last five and the half years, we think it is still day one in the cloud. There are many initiatives and innovations we are working on.

First, we are looking for geographic expansion as we continuously look at how well we are serving our customers from our existing AWS regions.

Moreover, we recently introduced Amazon ElastiCache, a new web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory cache for web applications running in the AWS cloud.

'Lack of enthusiasm bane of Indian SMEs'

Customers can add an in-memory cache to their application architecture in a short span of time. This new service improves the performance of web applications by enabling customers to retrieve information from a fast, managed, in-memory caching system in the cloud, instead of relying on slower disk-based databases.

The service also simplifies and offloads the management, monitoring and operation of in-memory cache environments, enabling businesses to focus their engineering resources on the differentiating parts of their applications.

We have also launched AWS CloudFormation early this year, which gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create a collection of related AWS resources. It provisions them in an orderly and predictable fashion.

Developers can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create their own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run their application.