Marc Crespi Dec 08, 2014
I am often asked why we placed our initial platform bets on VMware for on-premise clouds and AWS for off-premise. While the VMware choice may be obvious based on enterprise market share, people often have more questions about the choice of AWS as our first off-premise cloud platform.
Luckily there is plenty of market evidence to demonstrate AWS’ lead over other IaaS vendors both in terms of market share and technology. For example, a recent article in Daily Digest News by Chris Manning cites data showing that AWS has more than 2.5x the market share over its nearest competitor. It also highlights that AWS has released over 450 new products and programs for its service in the last few years and stores 137% more data than it did one year ago.
These market share numbers bear out that AWS is a long-term leader in the massive IaaS market. With that said, for IT organizations and service providers to consume resources on this powerful platform, it often requires extensive knowledge of the inner workings of the AWS provisioning and management tools. Without this knowledge, organizations may deploy applications that do not perform well or that cost more than necessary.
So again you might ask, why choose AWS for DR? The answer lies in our ability to tame this very powerful platform with automated software. We have taken the historically complex challenge of disaster recovery and unlocked the AWS platform as a way to drive simplicity and dramatic cost savings. We help IT organizations and service providers set up simple DR policies based on their business objectives and our software does the rest. The software automatically blueprints the on-premise assets and creates a fully functioning virtual data center in AWS to serve as a DR site. It requires very little manual provisioning and management on the part of the user. Further, we have optimized our solution for cost savings in this new cloud model. By limiting compute, data movement, and other costly operations, we can reduce the cost of DR over alternatives by as much as 80%.
That is why we chose AWS. AWS has market share and powerful cloud capabilities and we have the ability to harness that power simply, easily, and cost effectively. What more could one ask for? Well, maybe the same capabilities for other cloud service providers. All I can say is stay tuned.