An increasing number of CIOs now recognize the importance of the cloud and the benefits that cloud migration can bring to their organizations. Despite this, several common misconceptions exist in the minds of customers—often driven by a lack of understanding. To dispel such myths and help enterprise leaders make better decisions, AWS collaborated with IDC to generate a report titled “Top 4 Myths Every CIO Should Be Aware of in Their Journey to the Cloud.”
As a first step in the project, the AWS team collated the misconceptions their enterprise sales teams most frequently encountered. These were grouped into 4 categories. AWS offered counter-arguments for each myth, backed by relevant case studies. The IDC team working conducted independent research and put together the data, trends, drivers, and challenges. The final report integrates data-driven arguments and the AWS experience—aimed at creating awareness among customers and empowering them to choose the best path in their journey to the cloud.
Busting the Myths
AWS Director and Head Enterprise, India Vaishali Kasture, who first conceptualized the report, notes that despite
Myth 1: The cloud is best suited/easier for startups and not for large enterprises.
Reality: The cloud is the backbone of all digital transformation initiatives and will receive a large portion of IT investments from large enterprises, growing at a CAGR of 23.1% to reach $7,355.9 million by 2025.
Myth 2: The cloud brings challenges associated with security, ROI realization, people readiness, and downtime.
Reality: The cloud is becoming pivotal in the digital-first world, for value-based outcomes. With the right preparation and training, organizations can easily overcome the challenges of migrating to the cloud.
Myth 3: Running new-age services on cloud can get complex.
Reality: Cloud is the preferred platform for harnessing the potential of new-age services and AI workloads. Businesses can benefit from analytics on the cloud by using data to drive real-time business decisions.
Myth 4: Critical workloads should not reside on the cloud.
Reality: Enterprises are taking a “cloud first” approach to new application workloads, including business-critical workloads. Running Windows, SAP, and VMWare on the cloud offers numerous benefits. Running Windows on AWS, for example, lowers 5-year cost of operations by 56% and unplanned downtime by 98%, offering a 442% 5-year ROI. Similarly, IDC finds that 85.4% AWS customers report a significant or modest cost improvement by moving to AWS for their SAP landscapes. “VMware Cloud on AWS” customers are also realizing significant value, with a 5-year ROI of 479%.
The Benefits of Migrating to the Cloud
The IDC report finds that AWS customers cite several benefits of using AWS offerings, including better business and operations value compared to industry standards. With AWS as their cloud service provider, companies have derived consistent ROI. For example, by choosing AWS to build its IT and cybersecurity posture, Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Co. (BAGIC) fortified its data security, identifying security issues quickly and effectively. It used Centralized Service Control Policies, encrypting the data at rest and deploying a third-party vulnerability scanning tool. Popular OTT service Hotstar turned to AWS to scale and manage 25+ live events concurrently—sending event feeds to multiple playout stations, scaling resources based on real-time viewership, and distributing individual feeds for localization and targeted ad insertion. Using the AI/ML automation pipeline platform on AWS, famous watch brand Titan migrated 2 models as a pilot. It also built a future-ready reusable library of components for 50+ models and reduced the time taken to perform complex model execution tasks to a few minutes.