Amazon Web Services and NTT deliver multicloud success

Who’s joining the multicloud club?

But which types of organizations are now migrating to the cloud, and what kind of workloads are they moving?

Irshad Buchh, Principal Solutions Architect at AWS, says both commercial and public sector organizations are increasingly moving their workloads into the cloud.

“We see a lot of mainframe migrations,” he says. “Public sector customers running IBM transactional processing or batch workloads in their on-premises data centers are moving these workloads into AWS, into the cloud.”

NTT DATA and AWS jointly offer Unikix, software that helps these clients to migrate their legacy workloads to the AWS cloud and modernize them.

“We also see our customers and enterprises moving a lot of their databases into the cloud,” Irshad adds.

AWS’s managed services for databases cover both relational and NoSQL databases. AWS provide a program called Database Freedom to help clients who are running their commercial, license-based database software on-premises – often at great expense – to reduce the total cost of ownership of these databases and move them into AWS.

“From a NoSQL perspective, we have a lot of customers running Apache Cassandra and we help them move these databases into AWS with the help of our managed NoSQL offering called Amazon DynamoDB,” he says.

Secure, affordable and private

When organizations consider moving to the cloud, security is a top concern, says Irshad, and therefore AWS provides security guidance alongside its tools and services.

“How do we make sure that customers and partners get that security posture around the public cloud as well as inside the cloud? We use a shared-responsibility security model, where we as the cloud provider take the responsibility of the services that we offer – such as compute, storage, databases and networking – and allow our customers and partners to take up the responsibility inside the cloud when they deploy their applications or create their databases.”

Cost is another factor that may give the C-suite pause for thought, but Irshad says AWS has reduced the pricing of its cloud services more than 100 times since launching its platform, and these adjustments will continue. “This is possible because we operate at scale, and we pass on the benefits of the economy of scale directly to the end customers,” he explains.

Data ownership and sovereignty remain key. “As a partner or a customer, you own the data. You have the leverage of taking the data wherever you want. We want to make sure that data residency is honored by all the services we offer.”

Irshad also believes organizations’ fears of vendor lock-in are less prevalent with AWS because it’s based on open APIs. “We give you the tools to migrate your application from on-premises to AWS. You can use the same tools to take your data wherever you want. You are the owner and the controller. We just want to make sure that you do the right thing wherever you deploy your applications, now or down the line.”

Go local to go faster

Apart from trends such as a focus on sustainability, adapting to hybrid working, AIOps and end-to-end security, AWS has also noticed a rise in use cases pertaining to latency-sensitive edge computing.

Irshad gives the example of an oil-industry client in Houston that needs their data processed near the oilfield source while following data residency requirements. Looking at AWS’ global infrastructure, the nearest AWS region for Houston would be Virginia on the US East Coast – but this would mean the client faced unacceptable latency in the double-digit milliseconds.

To address these issues, AWS has created infrastructure constructs such as local zones to bring their AWS infrastructure closer to these clients – who then get the core services they need from the public cloud, thus reducing the latency to single-digit milliseconds.

“This is a trend we’re seeing across industries – media and entertainment, financial institutions, manufacturing,” he says. “It’s going to grow over the next 12 to 24 months.”

Organizations that want to make the most of these trends need the combined expertise of partners like NTT and AWS to host their information technology in the multicloud ecosystem while they transform their legacy estate according to an informed and well-coordinated plan.

Read more about NTT’s Multicloud as a Service.

Oscar Garcia is Senior Vice President of Strategy, Technology and Platforms at NTT.