India has such a broad swathe of companies – innovative startups, established enterprises and government customers — and Amazon Web Services (AWS) is more than ready to serve their Cloud-based needs with utmost encryption across the spectrum, a top company executive has stressed…writes NISHANT ARORA
For Peter DeSantis, Vice President, Global Infrastructure and Customer Support at AWS, the retail giant Amazon’s Cloud arm, the meetings with the customers in the country brings forth their most concerning demand: complete security of their data.
“India is a very exciting market for us. We are serving small to big customers here and the continuous growth means a lot to us,” DeSantis told IANS on the sidelines of the just-concluded AWS India Summit here.
“The aim is to provide better security for our customers. You can’t be a successful Cloud provider without spending a large amount of time thinking about security, and how you make it easier for your customers to achieve that security.”
The company has a shared security model, which means it has to focus on the security of everything – from the service all the way down to the hardware, the data centre and the physical security.
“Since we’re doing that at a large scale and we’re focused, on all those areas, we can invest in ways that additional enterprise could never invest,” the executive explained.
AWS has announced the third availability zone in its Mumbai region. The company launched its AWS Asia Pacific Mumbai Region with two availability zones in 2016 and has seen tremendous growth in adding new customers.
“We offer over 200 security compliances, more than any other Cloud provider. Over 130,000 databases have been migrated so far globally with AWS,” informed DeSantis.
AWS Mumbai Region had over 75,000 active customers in India with the start of the Mumbai region in 2016 and now serves hundreds of thousands in the country.
“While we focus on security, we have been able to provide the services which actually allow our customers to achieve better security on their own applications.
“Ten years ago, customers were asking is the Cloud secured. Today, customers are saying, I need to get to the Cloud to be secure. That is exciting for us,” DeSantis told IANS.
Every large enterprise today, whether in India or anywhere in the world, is thinking about how they get to the Cloud.
“The reason they want to get to the Cloud is because they want agility, because they know that if they don’t move quickly, some strong startup is going to come and take over whatever business they’re at.
“Every industry is being reinvented. If you’re an enterprise, you tuned in to figure out how to get the agility at the top,” he noted.
Most enterprises are doing a combination of workload migration – running in some sort of hybrid configuration and extending their environment into AWS, and building new workloads.
“They tend to focus on building and re-engineering the workloads, where agility matters the most. If it’s a core part of your business where you want to move quickly, that’s where you’re going to invest the effort in re-engineering.
“If it is sort of some less important workload, you might choose to just migrate it and worry about it later. So most companies and large enterprises are doing a combination of both and India is no exception,” he informed.
His message to the enterprises: Push your boundaries and improve customers’ experience.
“If you’re not doing that, somebody else is going to figure out how to do that for you,” he mentioned.