Advertisment

AWS Outposts Technology and its Benefits during Lockdown

AWS Outposts Technology and its Benefits during Lockdown for enterprises in Cloud computing, on-premise data usage and data analytics

author-image
Archana Verma
Updated On
New Update
AWS

Amazon Web Services has announced the general availability of AWS Outposts in India. It delivers a fully managed service that allows customers to run AWS compute, storage, database,and other services on-premises, while seamlessly connecting to AWS’s broad array of services in the cloud. AWS Outposts brings native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to virtually any Datacentre, co-location space, or on-premises facility. With AWS Outposts, customers can use the same AWS APIs, control plane, tools and hardware on-premises as in the AWS cloud to deliver a truly consistent hybrid experience.

Advertisment

Customers in India who have workloads that require low latency access to on-premises systems,or have local data processing requirements can benefit from AWS Outposts. These include applications that may need to generate near real-time responses, communicate with other on-premises systems, or control on-site equipment such as factory floor equipment, health management systems, and retail point of sale systems.

Puneet Chandok, President, Commercial Business, India & South Asia, Amazon Internet Services, said, “We are pleased to bring AWS Outposts to India. With AWS Outposts, our customers can benefit from the accelerated pace of innovation in the cloud, while securely storing and processing sensitive data on-premises. As AWS Outposts is a fully managed service by AWS, our customers can also focus on their end users and drive innovation that differentiates their businesses, while leaving the responsibility of managing the infrastructure to us.”

Tech Mahindra, an APN Advanced Consulting Partner focusing on digital transformation, consulting, and business re-engineering services, highlighted how AWS Outposts can enable innovative enterprise and network applications. “The emergence of 5G and edge computing is fundamentally changing the cloud to a distributed edge cloud, and supercharging digital transformations. The ability to serve latency-sensitive applications closer to the customer with AWS Outposts will create a new wave of innovation in enterprise and network applications. As part of our TechMNxt charter, we are excited to partner with an innovator like AWS in this ground-breaking initiative,” said Manish Mangal, CTO, Network Services, Tech Mahindra.

Advertisment

On this occasion,  Siva S, Founder & CEO, Powerupcloud Technologies, Bangalore, a Partner of AWS, interacted with DQ Channels and he elaborated upon the  benefits of AWS Outpost. Following are extracts from his interview with us -

Describe the technology of AWS Outposts and how it has an edge over other kinds of Cloud technologies

Powerupcloud Technologies started in 2015 out of Bangalore and has gone on to become one of the fastest companies in the world to become an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. We have been closely working with AWS through several service announcements and launches - we were among the first set of partners featured for AWS machine learning services and are now very excited to be launching AWS Outposts. We are keen to see the ways in which AWS Outposts sets out to redefine the hybrid cloud model that we know today.

Advertisment

AWS Outposts delivers a fully managed service that allows customers to run AWS compute, storage, database, and other services on premises, while seamlessly connecting to AWS’s broad array of services in the cloud. The Outposts brings native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to virtually any data center, co-location space, or on premises facility. With the Outposts, customers can use the same AWS APIs, control plane, tools, and hardware on-premises as in the AWS Cloud to deliver a truly consistent hybrid experience. For large enterprises and CIOs, this is really a game changer because they can now experiment without large investments on the hardware side and change the game for the hybrid cloud.

How has the business graph been during the lockdown?

If we look at 2020, Corona has changed the ways in which businesses operate. Businesses have had to quickly cut costs and work towards making their technology digitally native so there are little to no dependencies. Our business is growing even faster since the beginning of 2020.

Advertisment

In addition to being the CEO of Powerupcloud Technologies, I also head the cloud business for LTI globally and interact with many countries around the world. Our pipeline is growing at 2x, and the cloud adoption rate has also increased.  We see cloud adoption as being the most prevalent in segments such as Financial Services, Media and Entertainment and High-tech (large scale global technology and digitally-native companies with the internet as their primary business). We also see manufacturing, auto and airline companies using this time to modernize their IT by moving to the cloud. Because of the pandemic, they are somewhat in a lean period, and they are using this time wisely to modernize their IT, as they want to be in a better position when Corona declines.

Do you have any use cases from 2020 to show how the enterprises have adopted cloud specifically in 2020? 

In terms of trends, the first is that we have witnessed that large scale enterprise migrations are underway. Second is the massive growth in data analytics in 2020. It’s now very important to bring all data together in one place, especially for businesses in the retail industries. We work with customers in media, manufacturing, healthcare and have helped them build a centralised data lake on AWS which will help pull all their apps and data together and apply ML using Amazon SageMaker services and extract right insights from their business. The third trend is end-user services - Amazon Connect and Amazon WorkSpaces, which allows you to launch virtual desktops on cloud. These are done by enterprises to handle the WFH scenario. Over the next two years we will see trends such as Everything From Home (XFH) where most of the workforce will work from home and technology will enable them to work, grow and learn from home.

Advertisment

What are the use cases you see for AWS Outposts?

From a cloud standpoint, the Outposts will be revolutionary. If you consider any large enterprise IT setup, about 80 percent of their work would fall under three categories: compute, database and storage, and AWS Outposts addresses these exact needs for enterprises.  With our customers, the two most common pain points we see are the need to run low latency applications on the cloud, and following regulatory norms. The Outposts will help our customers tackle these challenges.

For example, one of the largest hospital chains in India which spends a lot of money to store PACS images (MRI, X-Ray) had to spend a lot with regard to on premises storage. In 2018, they wanted to explore cloud, but the problem was latency. A lot of time was taken to transfer and retrieve images, so the Outposts sits beautifully here as a solution as it provides low latency, and customers can leverage the cloud.

Another customer, a large financial services conglomerate in stock trading was held back on its use of cloud due to regulatory norms. The good part is that with the Outposts, we can solve these kind of use cases and requirements, and see a large adoption for the service.

Outside India, in the US, we see the Outposts addressing the needs of large automotive manufacturing companies, as they have custom and assembly line software for manufacturing applications, and these applications can’t run on the cloud as the amount of data crunching needed is immense. India has a high amount of these needs as well, in terms of high data crunching with low latency. These are some use cases where we have experienced customer pain points and needs, and see the Outposts immediately being able to address.

aws outposts
Advertisment