Aws Sentinel
AWS meets the enterprise head on
Amazon Web Services must have been a very interesting company to work for over the past five years. My conversations with AWS senior executives have sometimes been fraught — not because of any conflict or contention, but rather due to the pervading feeling that any discussion was getting in the way of activity. The organisation has been so busy doing what it is doing (and making a pretty reasonable fist of it) that it it barely has had time to stop to talk.
Any thoughts or feedback about how AWS might do things differently, about how the needs of the enterprise could be better achieved, were met with flummoxed consternation. It’s all completely understandable, in a company which measures success by the number of new features achieved or services shipped, to question any question of whether it is doing enough. But still, the question has needed to be asked.
Against this background, watching the feet is a far better option of watching the mouth. The company has come a long way since its early stance of offering an out-and-out alternative to in-house enterprise IT processing and storage and indeed, continues to work on delivering ‘the’ technology platform for digital-first organisations that need, and indeed desire, little in the way of infrastructure.
From an enterprise perspective however, and despite some big wins, many decision makers still treat the organisation as the exception rather than the norm. In part this is through no fault of AWS; more that you couldn’t just rip and replace decades worth of IT investments, even if you wanted to. In many cases, the cheaper (in both money and effort) option is to make the most of what you have — the blessing and the curse of legacy systems.
In addition, as IT staffers from CIOs to tape operatives are only too aware, the technology is only one part of the challenge. Over the years, Enterprise IT best practice has evolved to encompass a wide variety of areas, not least how to develop applications and services in a sustainable manner, how to maintain service delivery levels, how to pre-empt security risks and assure compliance, how to co-ordinate a thousand pools of data.
And, above all, how to do so in what sometimes feels like a horseless cart careering down a hill, even as the hill itself is going through convulsions of change, just one slope in a wide technology landscape that shimmers and twists to adapt to what is being called the ‘digital wave’ of user-led technology adoption. Within which AWS itself is both driving the cause and feeling the effect of constant change. Is it any wonder that such conversations may sometimes falter?
So what? Well, my perception is that as AWS matures, the underlying philosophy of the organisation is becoming more aligned to these, very real enterprise needs. This can only be a perception: if you asked AWS execs whether they cared about security, they would look at you askance, because of course the organisation would not have got to where it was without pretty strong security built in. Similarly, the AWS platform is built with the needs of developers front and centre. And so on.
What’s changing is how these areas are being positioned, to incorporate a more integrationist, change-aware foundation. For example, development tools are evolving to support the broader needs of integrated configuration and delivery management, DevOps automation and so on. Security teams are not only delivering on security features, but are broadening into areas such policy-based management and, for example, how to reduce the time to resolution should a breach occur.
The seal on the deal is AWS’ recently announced Managed Services (previously codenamed Sentinel) offering, which brings ITIL-type features — change management, performance management, incident management and so on — into the AWS portfolio. The toolset originally appeared on the radar back in June last year but wasn’t launched until December, perhaps in recognition of the fact that it had to be right. It’s also available both to end-user organisations and service providers or outsourcing organisations.
AWS’ incorporation of ITIL best practice kicks into touch any idea that AWS doesn’t ‘get’ the enterprise. And meanwhile, many other areas of AWS’ evolving catalogue of capabilities, and indeed the organisation’s rhetoric, reinforce a firming up of direction to take into account the fact that enterprise IT is really, really hard and therefore requires a change-first mindset. From the organisation’s confirmation that the world will be hybrid for some time yet, to the expansion of Snowmobile to a 100 Petabyte shipping container, to simple remarks like “many customers don’t know what they have,” all serve to illustrate this point.
Such efforts continue to be a work in progress, as IT is never ‘done’. Plenty remains for AWS to deliver internally, in terms of how products integrate, how features are provided and to whom: this will always be the case in a rapidly changing world. Nonetheless the organisation is a quick learner which is moving beyond seeing cloud-based services as something ‘out there’ that need to be ‘moved to’, and towards an understanding that it can provide a foundation the enterprise can build upon, offering not only the right capabilities but also the right approach.
With this understanding, AWS can engage with enterprise organisations in a way that the enterprise understands, even as enterprises look to make the kinds of transformations AWS and other technology providers have to offer. Finally the organisation can gain the right to be a partner with traditional enterprises alongside the cloud-first organisations it has preferred to highlight thus far.