Heading down to the AWS Public Sector Symposium this June meant leaving my house at O’Dark early but it also meant that Amazon was providing us breakfast. As with everything Amazon does, the breakfast was top notch.
Okay, now that I’ve covered the most important part (food), let’s move on to the real stuff. At the Day 2 breakfast (yes, food again), I had the good fortune to sit down next to two very experienced Federal IT experts.
One was a very tenured CTO that I know from a “prior life.” He provides the IT vision and road map of an organization that is using AWS to share their research data with over 25 countries. This allows the best minds around the world to collaborate continuously, in real time, on some of the most critical public health challenges. The advances in his line of work have literally saved lives by allowing them to find solutions much faster. That, to me, far outweighs just saving money; this is the real promise of what cloud computing can bring us.
The other was a Federal IT employee who was more at the operations level. He had been with his agency for years and he knows what is necessary to get the job done; he was clearly a “no-nonsense” person. For the most part, the things he shared weren’t new to me. However, it was new to hear it coming from someone the middle of an organization, where we usually encounter resistance to the adoption of cloud for fear of it “moving their cheese.” Having already gone through it, he was confident in the fact that his organization would not only still need his expertise, but allow him to focus on the parts of his job that he wanted to do.
He shared how one of Amazon’s leading partners was helping him simply be more effective at his job. Sure, he was saving on costs, but he really focused more on his newfound ability to focus on his job instead of getting mired up in all of the red tape of contracts and procurement. Simply put, he got started with just a credit card and was able to turn up the required IT infrastructure in minutes, which previously would have taken months. The final push that made his decision was the realization that “if it doesn’t work for me, I’ll just turn it off and it only cost a few thousand dollars vs. literally weeks or months and tens of thousands of dollars for the normal purchasing process.” He had seen his share of failed IT projects that wasted millions of dollars and countless months of his organization’s valuable time. This allowed him to see the kind of rapid results that we so often only find in a smaller/nimble commercial company. His story gave me hope that we will be seeing more of this no-nonsense adoption of AWS in the future – and it will help drive much-needed change for our Federal agencies in the way they purchase IT.
Finally, I was able to learn all of this while dressing up my oatmeal with all kinds of great toppings and enjoying a good cup of coffee. AWS, you sure know how to do it right.
