AWS London Enterprise Summit Nov. 2015 Recap
As Europe’s startup hub, it’s no surprise that AWS hosted its second Summit of 2015 right in the heart of London. This one, however, was specifically for Enterprise customers. The turnout was so high that Amazon actually had to send home some of its own in order to make room for all of the attendees at this sold out event.
Andy Jassy delivered the keynote and of course the first topic was the new region coming to the UK.
Andy Jassy, Sr VP AWS
Here were the five biggest takeaways:
- AWS continues to expand its global footprint
The UK will have its own region by early 2017, and plans for every country to have its own region in due course. - Security
The Guardian acknowledged that moving to AWS made them be more careful about security and affirmed that its sources are now safer in the cloud. AWS offers a free cloud security course here. - Compliance
AWS keeps adding to its growing number of certifications related to data security and PCI compliance. - FinTech
Capital One and Tesco Bank openly discussed their adoption and expansion of the AWS cloud. - AWS is powering some of the UK’s most innovative companies across various sectors:
Industry Heavyweight
Aviva– Mark Hall, Dir Global IT Ops. The 390 year old insurance company successfully migrated 70 applications and 141 dev and test environments to AWS and is realising a 30-50% savings. By year end, 200 environments are expected to be running in AWS.
Public Sector
Ministry of Justice – David Rogers, Head of Technology: AWS was a catalyst for cultural change at the MoJ, echoing Lydia Leongs’s Gartner findings.
Enterprise
Lebara – Richard Bastin, CTO. With massive success and more than 500,000 users on their entirely built on AWS mobile “Talk” app, Lebara has decided to go “all in” on Amazon.
#FinTech
Tesco Bank – Allan Brearley, Head of Transformation. Starting with a single web page hosted on S3, their latest product launch wouldn’t have been possible without AWS. The cloud was “business as usual” within just 8 months lead by strong CxO sponsorship.
Energy
British Gas Connected Homes’ Hive – Chris Livermore, Head of Operations, said that a move to AWS is a business transformation project, not just an IT migration issue.
Final Thoughts:
With rapid adoption across all industries in the UK, and now with its own region for data locality, 2017 will see a massive increase in UK AWS usage.