Recently unveiled enhancements to Amazon’s web services not only give customers more control over availability, they take the services closer to compliance with industry standards, a move that will ultimately make them more appealing to enterprise customers.
Today’s smart startups build their applications using on-demand compute infrastructure. Instead of high capital outlay, they get pay-as-you-go platforms that offer better reliability and reachability than most of them could achieve on their own. Such platforms also mean less dilution to investors early on and an ability to scale well once the crowds arrive.
There is, of course, a catch. In certain cases, you simply can’t use on-demand compute infrastructure. For example, some jurisdictions require that you keep confidential data within their borders. And other standards, like those of the Payment Card Industry, require tight controls on data center security that are hard for on-demand providers to comply with.
This is one of the reasons that enterprise customers have held back from porting their applications into cloud computing environments.
Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, said the company recently introduced the idea of “availability zones” that “allow the customer to specify in which location to launch a new EC2 instance.” This was announced under the auspices of better availability (”…applications can be protected from failure of a single location.”)
But features like availability zones and dedicated IP addresses don’t just improve availability and control for Amazon’s customers. They also make EC2 and S3 more appealing for enterprises.
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3 comments so far
6:55 PM PT
Don’t get me wrong I love Amazon Web Services, but come on.. Availability zones (Assumes failure) and dedicated IP (every hosting provider gives you this “feature”) both are obvious do little for the enterprise.
What enterprises want are
1. 24/7 Support (with a phone number)
2. SLA (Get out of beta and commit to some service numbers already)
3. QoS. (What kind of quality of service am i getting?)
4. Some kind of in cloud persistent storage system (notice: we offer elasticdrive for this)
As for whether or not fortune 500’s are flocking to AWS, based on the interest we’re seeing in Enomalism and related cloud services, they certainly are! (I just can’t talk about them)
12:45 PM PT
These are great additions to Amazons already great offering. Would still love to see that SLA but we wont talk about that here.
One note.., Availability Zones will do nothing for data protection concerns. If you have that level of concerns you are running your own data center most likely or hosting through someone who is SAS70 certified.
10:41 AM PT
[...] especially large enterprises that want to utilize Amazon’s on-demand infrastructure. Alistair Croll earlier this month wrote a post in which he argued that Amazon was going after larger corporations, and today’s announcement [...]
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