The fourth industrial revolution is coming and it’s going to be in the cloud. At least that’s if the Amazon Web Services [AWS] Summit, which was held on Thursday at the Cape Town International Convention Centre, is anything to go by.
More than 2,600 delegates attended the summit in order to learn more about the cloud services platform which offers businesses and start-ups on-demand computing power, data storage and content delivery.
These services are provided via the internet and enable users to pay-as-they-go and only for what they use.
Cloud computing means that businesses don’t have to invest in, and worry about, purchasing and running hardware like on-site servers, with which they would use to run websites or support the operations of their businesses.
AWS is used by millions of companies worldwide and their client base includes heavy hitters like Netflix, BP, Spotify, ABSA, Pick n Pay and Intel.
Geoff Brown, AWS general manager of sub-Saharan Africa, said: “Cloud computing is very similar to a utility, like electricity or something of that nature, it’s basically the on-demand access to use a technology service by use, by consumption, and it provides a tremendous amount of flexibility because when you buy something consumption-wise, you obviously then have the ability to make the decision to turn off that consumption. Which is different to the last 30 years of computing where people had to buy a physical piece of hardware and you couldn’t return it.”
Brown said the average business could expect to save between 50% and 70% when using a cloud service provider instead of traditional hardware and said that the fact that AWS, which has been around since 2006, has over one million customers indicates that “every possible business you can think of” can make use of the service, including small and medium businesses. “We have 18 different regions throughout the world where we've put down infrastructure, basically a big warehouse, obviously highly protected and secure [this is what makes up the cloud].”
Brown explained that with regards to security, AWS customers are offered something called “infrastructure as code”.
“When you give somebody the ability to run their infrastructure like code they can copy it, protect it, delete it, there are so many new things you can do with code and when things are automated they become more secure,” he explained, adding that there was no risk of disaster like fire destroying a company’s data as it would with on-premises hardware.
“The way we have successfully protected data is through building resilient architecture that also has several security controls. We don’t just store your data in one location – if a fire were to occur in that one availability zone it [the data] would have automatically been replicated to another site, that’s part of the automation,” he said.
Brown said some of the pros of moving from the traditional hardware approach to the cloud was the cut in cost, the pace of innovation, a better protection of data and the ability to analyse the way a customer uses services and tailor the services to suit this.
James Patterson, CEO of Aerobotics, a company which uses drone and satellite technology to analyse hectares of farmland and identifies healthy and unhealthy trees for farmers, said AWS provides his business with the performance, reliability, and agility needed to operate efficiently.
At the conference, the launch of a second new data storage centre in South Africa – Amazon’s CloudFront edge location in Cape Town was announced. This will give South African Amazon customers “fast content delivery, acceleration and higher performance for their websites and applications”...