AWS says Shadow IT has helped it win over enterprise cloud doubters

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Cloud giant says Shadow IT played an important role in bringing its offerings to the attention of enterprise CIOs & CTOs

Andy Jassy on stage
(Image credit: AWS Press Office)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has credited the Shadow IT trend for helping it make early in-roads into the enterprise market.

The cloud services giant said the covert adoption of its services by departments or small pockets of workers helped put the firm and its offerings on the radar of IT decision makers in the early days.

Speaking during a press Q&A session at the Re:Invent Conference in Las Vegas, Andy Jassy, senior vice president of AWS, explained: "A lot of the early enterprise business that we had with AWS was [from] all these teams frustrated with how fragile and slow the infrastructure was within their companies.

"They could start using AWS with just a credit card and they would actually get projects done when they wanted to get done... and then show the results to their leaders, their CTO and CIO and say, look we should do more of this'."

As a result, he said the firm is now increasingly dealing with CIO, CTOs and other IT decision makers on cloud deployments, which in turn - is making it easier for AWS to introduce business-friendly features to its platforms based on the feedback they get from them.

"We provide our customers with lots of opportunities to ensure people can run services on AWS in a secure way, and as you've seen over the last number of years, we're continuing to make it easier for enterprises to standardise the way all their groups within the enterprise that are using AWS," Jassy continued.

"Today the path of enterprise adoption is different, although we still have enterprises where they try things in small groups.

"But much more in the last couple of years than the first several, CIOs are typically involved and want to know about the platform and be comfortable [giving their] blessing [to] AWS for their entire organisation to use and know more about it."

This has been a key factor, he added, in giving enterprises the confidence to go "all-in" with their workloads and applications on the AWS cloud.

"I don't think there is anything inappropriate [for the enterprise] to run in the cloud now," he concluded.

Caroline Donnelly
Caroline Donnelly is the news and analysis editor of IT Pro and its sister site Cloud Pro, and covers general news, as well as the storage, security, public sector, cloud and Microsoft beats. Caroline has been a member of the IT Pro/Cloud Pro team since March 2012, and has previously worked as a reporter at several B2B publications, including UK channel magazine CRN, and as features writer for local weekly newspaper, The Slough and Windsor Observer. She studied Medical Biochemistry at the University of Leicester and completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Magazine Journalism at PMA Training in 2006.