On 11 May Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosted a Summit in Stockholm with over 5,000 attendees, +50 sessions and +60 partners. AWS also offers a huge marketplace with third-party vendors. Key themes at the summit were the expanding AWS global infrastructure, security and trust, the growing capabilities in the AWS cloud and the data-driven business.

AWS has continued to expand its global infrastructure and recently launched a new AWS Europe Region in Stockholm. Millions of customers globally use AWS to become more agile and innovative while lowering costs through the scale that AWS brings. Currently AWS offers 26 global cloud computing regions that are made up of clusters of data centers with 84 availability zones to provide high resilience and availability. Eight more regions are coming soon. AWS has also announced more local zones even closer to end-users in a further 26 countries, including 12 across Europe. AWS is constantly adding more regions and zones.

Security and trust are a top priority for AWS today. Customers retain control of all their data and how you grant access to it – a key aspect of cloud computing as requirements and regulations become more complex. AWS now offers more than 230 security and compliant services. Security was a clear trend at the AWS Summit, with a focus on the special needs for decentralised environment of cloud native.

Today a key success factor for a cloud computing provider is to have a broad and deep set of services and capabilities to support any kind of workload. AWS now offers more than 200 fully featured services such as compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, IoT, AI, machine learning, virtual reality, mobile, security, hybrid, application development and management. The cloud has become an enabler of a fundamental shift in the way business works. The pace of innovation is accelerating. In 2021 alone, AWS added more than 3,000 new capabilities and features. Many of these new features and use-cases were showcased at the AWS Summit Stockholm, like “Using ML in loan underwriting decisions.”

The cloud has changed the way we build business and at the core is data. Modern apps store massive amounts of data. Meanwhile that cost of compute and storage has come down. As a result, business is storing more data than ever. There will be over 97 zettabytes of data created in 2022 alone. However, many organizations are not ready to reap the benefits of data. A modern data-driven strategy needs to be secure, flexible and scalable. It builds on three pillars: modernize, unify and innovate. Organizations first modernize by migrating their data to the cloud to achieve scale, then unifying data storage, finally putting the data to work by leveraging with AI, analytics and machine learning on top of the data.

Some final take-aways from AWS Summit in Stockholm. AWS is today a must-have platform for players like VMware, SAP, Telia, IKEA and others. There is a strong focus on startups and certifications to get people onboard the AWS cloud. Cloud consulting is also big with groups like Knowit, Capgemeni and Accenture making AWS a core of their offerings. Telia just announced a strategic partnership with AWS. The bottom line? We think AWS will gradually take a larger share of the Nordic cloud market.

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