Every year, the AWS Summits and re:Invent get bigger (and broader – AWS lists 15 cities for AWS Summits in 2014 on their website). In his keynote at the New York event last week, Werner Vogels, CTO of AWS announced there were 10,000+ people in attendance and thousands more participating online via the live stream. We were fortunate to be among the thousands at last week’s event, along with our friends at Logicworks and others.

So the numbers show AWS adoption is definitely increasing and based on the customers who participated with Werner in the keynote, it looks like enterprise customer adoption is on the rise as well. Organizations like FINRA, Siemens, Conde Nast and Novartis all spoke about how they’re working with AWS. For many of these enterprise organizations, this includes running very sensitive workloads in the cloud. Siemens described using AWS to support healthcare analytic applications and Novartis gave an interesting example about amazing cost and performance improvements they’re achieving by using AWS high performance computing to analyze data for drug trials.

Werner talked about the many services AWS provides to enable cloud security, like the CloudTrail service that AWS introduced at re:Invent last year and the ability to generate and deploy physical access keys with CloudHSM. Werner’s claim (and many would support him) is that with all the services that AWS provides, your IT infrastructure can be even more secure in the AWS cloud than if you host your IT infrastructure in your on-premises environment.

One interesting theme we noticed in the previews before the keynote, from the customers who presented with Werner and in other sessions was that people play a big role in managing and securing AWS.  At other AWS events, there’s been lots of great talk about automation (which is still important) but we found at this event, there was more discussion about working with AWS account teams, support, cloud architects and others who can help organizations make the most of their AWS deployments. Some of the people discussion might be driven by enterprise customers like FINRA, Siemens, Conde Nast, Novartis and others who have large, complex AWS deployments and want to leverage expertise to help optimize them.

We expect the people discussion is also driven by a desire to achieve economies of scale in AWS. Werner described in his presentation that as AWS builds more infrastructure to support more and more customers, it leads to economies of scale for their organization, which they translate into less costly infrastructure for their customers. The same happens with people who are managing and securing AWS. When an organization like Logicworks manages more AWS environments or Alert Logic secures them, we grow our expertise and build our own economies of scale, which translates into increased value for the organizations we work with.

Learn more about Logicworks Managed AWS service.