AWS CEO Adam Selipsky at MWC – 5G, Cybersecurity and Sustainability in the Cloud

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AWS CEO Adam Selipsky took to the stage at MWC on Tuesday to deliver his keynote. The subject was the huge advances that have been made in mobile and telecoms thanks to these sectors’ enthusiastic adoption of cloud.

Selipsky has led AWS since returning last year to the subsidiary where he previously served in marketing for 11 years. During a five-year absence, he took on roles including president and CEO of Tableau, which he led through its acquisition by Salesforce. As his second major keynote following his appearance at Re:Invent in December, I was very interested to hear his views on the future of cloud in this sector.

Selipsky is widely recognized as one of the earliest advocates of cloud computing. He played an instrumental role in expanding its uptake outside of the software development industry where it started. With the cloud computing industry now approaching a value of half a trillion dollars – and AWS itself positioned as the clear market leader – his ideas and opinions are always worth paying attention to.

Cloud is now integrated across every industry, but this being MWC the focus was, of course, on how it is set to impact telecoms. Selipsky started by highlighting the strident advances that have been made by companies, including Deutsche Telekom, which in 2019, set a goal of moving 60% of its applications into the cloud. As a result, it has now reduced the time-to-market of new initiatives from an average of six months to two and a half months. Also singled out for recognition was Vodaphone Africa, which is in the process of migrating 1,400 applications into the cloud. One particular success story centers on its Vodapay digital wallet application, which has been downloaded 1.4 million times since launching in October last year.

5G and the cloud

Selipsky is a firm advocate of the idea that 5G is set to be a key driver of cloud adoption in the coming years. For the telecoms sector in particular, it’s important to remember that 5G represents more than simply the chance to do things we’ve been doing for years, but faster. I’ve long believed that the winners of the 5G race will be those who use it for entirely new apps involving new types of data. This was also highlighted by Selipsky when he pointed to services including gaming, digital banking, and healthcare as opportunities to build out this kind of innovation.

Selipsky announced that in Brazil, Telef?nica Vivo would build a cloud-native 5G network core on AWS to dynamically allocate and expand 5G network capacity according to the needs of its customers, which will be an important contribution to Telefónica's digital transformation.

“Service providers are at the center of this data explosion,” he told the conference, “which creates both a challenge and an enormous opportunity when working to manage, secure and process it all.”

The keynote also touched on the fact that, in line with every other industry, data is increasingly becoming a key strategic business asset and a differentiator between winners and also-rans in telecom and mobile.

Here he highlighted work done by Telia in the Nordic region, which built automated customer data services on AWS, increasing product sales by 150% and sales of value-add services by a factor of 10.

It’s clear that this will be another area where huge growth will be achieved, as companies in the sector get more comfortable with the data-driven marketing capabilities that emerge when you combine data with cloud and then stir in advanced analytics capabilities using artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Cybersecurity and sustainability

The global pandemic that we are still living through has been hugely disruptive to society, and among the many challenges that have emerged has been a surge in cybercrime, hacking, and data breaches. This is simply because the migration of so much of our lives into the online realm – from work and education to shopping and socializing – has resulted in a more target-rich environment for the tech-savvy criminals among us. Also taking into account the growing amount of regulations around what can and can’t be done with personal data, Selipsky posited that cloud – including hybrid and multi-cloud solutions -offers solutions to many of the security and privacy challenges the industry is facing.

The key theme of Selipsky’s address was the benefits that have been achieved by the early adopters of cloud in the telecom industry. However, perhaps even more importantly, he also pointed to the potential it has to help companies meet their commitments around reducing environmental impact. In this area, cloud service providers – including AWS – have shifted focus in recent years from reducing or even eliminating their own carbon footprint to helping their customers do the same to theirs. After all, the data and IT infrastructure-as-a-service model they offer means that if they can reduce energy use and emissions at their cloud data centers, this will create knock-on reductions across entire industries that rely on them. To this end, Selipsky rounded off his keynote by announcing the launch of the AWS Customer Carbon Footprint tool. This creates an easy way for organizations to access information on the emissions created by the cloud infrastructure they are using, to help them calculate progress towards their own goals.

Selipsky’s keynote made it clear that after close to 20 years in the field, pushing cloud into new and innovative use cases is still firmly at the top of his agenda. It is clear that he understands that cloud has a key role to play in driving the uptake of 5G, by enabling the infrastructure that will support a new generation of applications and use cases. To this end, the most important takeaway for me is that flexibility, security, innovation, and sustainability are the keywords that the telecoms sector needs to focus on if it is going to achieve everything it can with the technology available to it.

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About Bernard Marr

Bernard Marr is a world-renowned futurist, influencer and thought leader in the field of business and technology. He is the author of 20 best-selling books, writes a regular column for Forbes and advises and coaches many of the world’s best-known organisations. He has over 2 million social media followers, over 1 million newsletter subscribers and was ranked by LinkedIn as one of the top 5 business influencers in the world and the No 1 influencer in the UK.