Security Is Job Zero

As many know, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the recognized leader in public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), offering more than 70 cloud computing services and with more than a million customers in 190 countries worldwide. With a current run rate of $13 billion and growing at 55 percent annually, the company is on a roll.

I had the good fortune recently to sit down with Mike Clayville, vice president of worldwide commercial sales at AWS, and pick his brain about IT innovation, his company’s model for success, and how the Gigamon Visibility Platform is helping customers on their journey to the cloud.

With no irony intended, I’d say we live in interesting times, especially with respect to technology. What do you think?

Mike: Absolutely. In fact, I think we’re living in a once-in-a-lifetime kind of era. Where a major transformation is unfolding before us like a massive, cresting wave. And it’s the public cloud that’s generating this wave, which portends to deliver more significant IT innovations than we’ve ever seen before.

Already, companies have been leveraging the cloud to create new markets—like Airbnb in the hospitality industry; Supercell in gaming. They’ve also been using it to create entirely new product categories—like Samsung’s Smart TV, which is built on AWS.

In another five years, I predict that we’ll look back on 2017 as a pivotal year for cloud adoption, as the year the cloud matured. We’re on the precipice of change and, today, companies are starting to turn to the cloud to derive even greater value. In addition to helping create new markets, new products, and cost savings, the cloud is ultimately about business agility.

General Electric, for example, has cut the cost of running its infrastructure by 52 percent. But what’s even more valuable? The ability the cloud has given them to react faster to changing market conditions. Vodafone might say the same. They recently took a new product offering to Australia and, thanks to the cloud, what normally would have taken six months to stand up as a business took just six weeks.

Agility is what’s now truly driving cloud adoption. Companies want to be nimble in the marketplace. They want to be able to address new opportunities today, but they also want to be able to predict what their customers will want tomorrow.

What’s key to AWS’s success?

Mike: At AWS, we focus on our strengths. And if there’s one thing we do extremely well, it’s innovate. The AWS Marketplace has more than 2,600 available software offerings that our customers can deploy with a single click. In 2015, we created 722 new features and services. This year, we’re set to well exceed that number.

And now with the Gigamon Visibility Platform integrated into our marketplace, we are also set to unblock some of the workloads that enterprises have delayed migrating because they wanted a better view into and understanding of network traffic. The Gigamon Visibility Platform provides rich insight into content as well as the data inspection and protection capabilities that customers have been waiting for.

What matters most at AWS is creating value for our customers. Not only are we customer-obsessed, but we want to be the most customer-obsessed company on the planet. Our results are simply a lagging indicator of the important things we’re doing—which, with great partners like Gigamon, is helping customers migrate to the cloud.

Gigamon is thrilled to be partnering with AWS. Can you talk a bit more about the importance of visibility of data in motion?

Mike: In the past two years, there has been a rush for enterprises to migrate to the public cloud. Almost every single industry has made a substantial investment in the cloud.

But if there’s one thing customers ask me about most, it’s visibility into data in motion. Again and again, I hear: “I need visibility into the platform, regardless of the workload location; and I need to be able to effectively manage, secure, and understand all of the data that is in motion across my entire platform—including on-prem and in the public cloud.”

If you think about what companies want to do in the cloud, they want to build new customer-centric applications. That requires deep analytics capabilities in order to predict what their customers want and, in turn, to create meaningful value propositions. It also requires data stability and security assurances if customers are to rely on the value propositions created.

And the key to all of that? Visibility—that’s the real value. And that’s why AWS is focused on providing visibility of data in motion and data analytics so that organizations can interact with their customers in a new way. I call it “active participation” with customers, and it goes hand in hand with helping extend their market reach across the world. It’s also why Gigamon has been an incredible partner for AWS. Yours is a company with a great reputation, long history, and the innovative visibility tools needed to create a platform for enterprises to confidently migrate more workloads to the public cloud.

With enhanced visibility from Gigamon and all of AWS’s new features and services, we are allowing customers to innovate on top of our innovation so that they can become more agile, re-invest cost savings in market differentiation, and extend their market share. Take Supercell, for instance. The company used to be a local brand, but since moving to AWS, they are competing in ways never before possible and have built a total addressable market that’s now global.

I agree, of course, on the value of visibility for analytics and security. And when it’s hard to get through a day without hearing about a cybersecurity incident and with customers moving critical workloads onto your network, it’s obvious AWS takes security very seriously.

Mike: Security is job zero for AWS. It’s the most important thing we do. Even more than infrastructure-as-a-service, what we offer, what we sell is trust. And that’s why we spend a disproportionate amount of time, energy, and funds to ensure that our customers are protected.

With cyber threats increasing daily, we are dedicated to building a rich set of services that allows our customers to leverage a platform in a highly secure way. Gigamon provides a set of services that integrates with ours so that, together, we can deliver a complete and secure platform for critical customer data.

Thanks, Mike. We’re really excited to be a part of the AWS Marketplace and appreciate your insight regarding the future of cloud computing, where security is paramount.