Enterprises are always risk averse and so have always been slow-movers in any technology patterns. The cloud is no different in that respect, as for many years, the enterprises were watching the progress, sitting on the side-lines and waiting for others to be first-movers. It was at the same time that we saw a huge surge of many new start-ups that were all using the cloud and slowly started to disrupt the mainstream, well-established enterprises. As examples, Lyft and Uber challenged the taxi/transportation business, Airbnb disrupted the hospitality industry, and likewise Oscar Insurance radically changed the health insurance sector. These types of successes were never easier earlier, but now with the cloud, everyone has access to same set of services and infrastructure resources which they can scale up/down based on their business needs... and this changes the playing field for everyone.
As a result of the aforementioned effect, many enterprises have realized that before anyone else disrupts their business, they themselves have to do it and ride this wave of innovation with the cloud. Therefore, we have seen many enterprises not just adopt the cloud, but even go all-in in the last few years in an attempt to redefine their operational and business model. Although this list of enterprise customers is continuously increasing, we have seen customers like GE, Capital One, Adobe, Hess, Kellogg's, Novartis, Infor, Suncorp, BestBuy, Philips, Goldman Sachs, and so on have all gone public on their usage of one or the other cloud platforms.
Other than commercial entities, we have also seen government and public sector entities adopting the cloud in a big way. As a few examples, NASA, FDA, FINRA, the US Department of Homeland Security, Government of Singapore, Transport for London, Government of Ontario, Business Sweden, City of Tel Aviv, the Chilean Ministry of Health, and so on all have some or the other workloads deployed in the cloud and can be seen as public references on various cloud providers' websites.
The change for enterprises is huge, as it's not just a technology upgrade/re-platforming, but it also has many operational and business implications wherein everything is now on-demand/opex oriented versus capex, which is pretty new model for the enterprises. Other than that, in order to move fast and to truly harness the power of the cloud, they also need to have smaller teams (like DevOps, two-pizza teams) who can try out new cloud services and features rapidly and incorporate them in their application architectures. Apart from keeping this agile/innovative culture, enterprises also need to have proper governance and security controls in place so that they can demonstrate the right controls to their auditors and ensure that the laws of the land are being adhered to properly. To make these entire changes smoother, various cloud providers have come up with pretty comprehensive cloud adoption and change management frameworks, which help the enterprise customers' CIO/CTOs and various other stakeholders make the move to cloud in a frictionless and disruption-proof manner.
Another change all the enterprise customers have to handle is the training of their staff on the target cloud platform. For this, all cloud providers have comprehensive programs around training and certifications, which can help the customers and employees learn about service functionality, integration techniques, and best practices. However, apart from training their own employees, enterprise customers need experts to be involved in supporting them in critical phases of the project. For the same, all cloud providers have their specialist Professional Services consultants, who can come in and advise the customer on various technical, process, and project delivery aspects. To further help with the setup of Cloud Centers of Excellence (CCOE) and delivery teams equipped with the necessary cloud knowledge, in most cases, customers also make use of various consulting partners who specialize in various areas and help make cloud projects successful.
With the previously mentioned ingredients, customers are able to bring about change in their daily work and make their cloud native journey smooth and successful. As a result of these practices, we have seen some very interesting innovations from enterprise customers, as follows:
- Capital One's Amazon Alexa skill: https://www.capitalone.com/applications/alexa/
- FINRA Collects, Analyzes Billions of Brokerage Transaction Records Daily Using AWS: https://youtu.be/rHUQQzYoRtE
- NASA JPL's presentation on, How the Cloud is Helping Answer Cosmic Questions: https://youtu.be/8UQfrQNo2nE
- BMW Supports Model Launch, Develops Prospects with Cloud-Based Social Marketing: https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/bmw-supports-model-launch-develops-prospects-with-clo2
- Airbus Defense and Space improves the quality of satellite images using Cloud Machine Learning: https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/09/google-cloud-machine-learning-now-open-to-all-with-new-professional-services-and-education-programs