Marc Crespi Jul 24, 2015
Since we’re in the middle of baseball season, I think it is appropriate to say that Amazon’s AWS division knocked the cover off the ball (yet again) with their recent earnings release. They earned $391 million in profit on $1.82 billion in revenue, which represents a 407 percent increase in profit – and an 81 percent jump in revenue – from the year before.
What’s clear: Amazon’s AWS continues to dominate the public cloud landscape with no signs of slowing down.
The important question we need to address: Is this continued execution good for AWS’ customers, their technology partners and the market? For customers of all shapes and sizes, their maniacal focus on infrastructure, security, reliability, and low cost is delivering huge value. And when it comes to technology partners (like OneCloud Software), this robust platform helps augment our value proposition to our joint customers. This is – and will continue to – put pressure on AWS’ competitors who trail the giant by a massive distance.
More good news… untapped potential
Despite the meteoric growth, much of the potential market for using AWS remains untapped. There are a number of potential use cases, such as disaster recovery, that would be a great fit for AWS. Unfortunately, a lack of appropriate solutions that allow customers to consume the platform in a simple, automated, and cost-effective way keep them from becoming a reality.
Disaster recovery is a massive problem for organizations of all shapes and sizes. True disaster recovery requires a fully redundant IT infrastructure; building and managing that redundant infrastructure is (often prohibitively) expensive and complex. For many organizations, it is a painful way to spend significant portions of their IT budget. For others, it is simply not possible – and therefore they stop at simple backup (where “DR” may mean just a box of tapes in a vault and downtime measured in weeks or months).
For businesses today, leveraging AWS as a secondary data center for DR is impossible without support. Even if you could manually provision the tens of thousands of elements it would take to create the infrastructure, and bring in separate replication technology, the result would actually be more expensive and complex than a secondary data center of your own. The reason: a lack of automation and cost-optimization.
OneCloud Software’s OneCloud Recovery (OCR) product solves this problem and unlocks the massive power of the AWS platform for true disaster recovery. With OCR, a user with no prior knowledge of the AWS platform can establish the beginnings of a true DR strategy – over lunch. After installing the solution in any VMware-based data center, OCR will discover all of the applications, data and networking and automatically build a replica of that data center in AWS. Then, through the configuration of simple DR policies, OCR will begin to protect that data center in AWS, and allow recovery of assets in that data center – from 30 minutes up to 24 hours.
Let’s not forget about cost
Because of the advanced cost optimization technology built into OCR, OneCloud Software and its partners can deliver true disaster recovery to organizations of all sizes at 50 to 75% lower total cost than all other alternatives in the market. And we can prove it!
By having a free DR assessment using OneCloud’s Insight planning tool, we can predict your total costs before the first GB ever crosses over into AWS. Insight identifies all of the assets in your environment and then – by mocking up your planned DR policies – we can tell you the total cost of the solution, including an estimate of the on-going AWS costs.
So, I can say with complete confidence that AWS’ continued dominance is good news for all of us!