When we talk about cloud computing and the role that the cloud plays in a digital transformation process, it is practically inevitable to talk about Amazon Web Services (AWS). This company is a world leader in this market offering more than 200 comprehensive services from its infrastructure regions around the world.
As AWS itself explains in its guide “Accelerating the digital transformation in Spain”, access to cloud computing “reduces the cost of starting new business projects, encourages innovation and the development of new technologies, attracts more funds for new companies and stimulates higher economic growth.”
To understand why this is so and the role that the cloud can play in practically any digital transformation project, AWS refers to the great benefits of one of the most popular technologies: its consumption in a model as a service, eliminating uncertainty by not having to plan the provisioning, more speed and agility, simplifying the management and administration of technological resources and one scalability that allows you to develop a global reach in seconds.
To these, known to practically any company that has heard of cloud computing, AWS adds another three that are worth taking into account:
- Innovate quickly: even if we have an ICT heritage legacy, the cloud provides us with the latest technological innovations, accelerating application development.
- Experiment more profitably: Cloud-based products and services make it easy for companies and developers to experiment and launch all kinds of “pilot” projects, as they are not limited by their current infrastructure.
- Make data-driven decisions– In most organizations, departments collect and store data separately, creating silos in which each struggles to access each other’s data. This makes it difficult to perform in-depth analysis to improve decision making. Working in the cloud helps overcome these silos, allowing faster access to deeper information.
As indicated in the e-book “Accelerating the digital transformation in Spain”, the most outstanding benefits of the AWS cloud offering are:
- Security: infrastructure built specifically for the cloud and designed to meet the world’s most demanding security requirements, with 24 × 7 monitoring.
- Availability: AWS claims it offers the highest network availability of any cloud service provider, with seven hours less downtime than its closest competitor. Each region is completely isolated and is made up of several Availability Zones.
- Performance: AWS Regions offer low latency, low packet loss, and a fully redundant 100GbE fiber backbone.
- Global presence: made up of dozens of Availability Zones around the world, including the one that is about to be released in Aragon before the end of this year.
- Scalability: AWS ‘global infrastructure enables companies to be extremely flexible and take advantage of the conceptually infinite scalability of the cloud.
- Flexibility: Businesses that want to run their applications globally can choose from any of the available AWS regions and zones. If they also need to run their applications with millisecond latency, they can choose AWS Local Zones or AWS Wavelength. If they want to run their applications locally, they also have the ability to do so through AWS Outposts.
All of this has made it easier for AWS to become the leader in the cloud market in Spain as well, and to have success stories in all kinds of sectors. Among those that attract attention and that the company highlights in this document, those of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food who created a digital platform to prevent wildfires that runs on AWS using artificial intelligence (AI) technology; Cabify, which has moved its entire technology infrastructure to AWS in order to improve the availability, reliability, and responsiveness of its operations; or RavenPack, which thanks to Amazon Athena enables more efficient big data queries to financial services customers, helping them make better decisions.
AWS plans to launch a new AWS Region in Spain in mid-2022. Regions are physical locations around the world with data center clusters. We call each group of logical data centers an Availability Zone. The next AWS Region in the country will have three Availability Zones at launch.
The addition of the new AWS region will allow customers to run workloads and store data safely in Spain, in addition to satisfying end users with even lower latency. Today AWS also has the certification of the National Security Scheme (ENS) High Level, which means that its infrastructure meets the highest levels of security and compliance for state agencies and public organizations in Spain.
The new Infrastructure Region represents an investment by AWS of 2.5 billion euros over the next 10 years. In total, the company estimates that 1,300 full-time jobs will be created. Furthermore, AWS estimates that this investment will increase Spain’s GDP by approximately € 1.8 billion.
