The Business Value of Amazon Web Services Storage

Organizations increasingly see cloud infrastructure as the preferable backbone for digital transformation (DX) activities and IT modernization. This is evident by the sustained speed of growth in cloud expenditure, which increased 38% in 2019 to a global total of $49 billion and is expected to expand 34% in 2020 to a global total of $66 billion.

There's little question that increased use of cloud computing and storage resources is driving market development, but there are critical subtleties to this growth, such as the depth and breadth of adjacent cloud services that companies acquire once data is available.

Organizations are quickly growing their usage of the cloud in terms of the variety of apps and use cases as cloud adoption develops. 

Initially, corporations utilized the cloud mainly for building "greenfield" apps or non-production use cases. However, current buyer behavior patterns show that firms are increasingly implementing existing corporate workloads on the cloud. SQL databases for storing structured data, corporate resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) software, analytics, and high-performance computing (HPC) applications are examples of cloud application deployments. Organizations seek to migrate their workloads to the cloud in the least disruptive way possible, with little or no modifications to their current IT infrastructure or processes.

IDC surveyed enterprises on how they utilize Amazon Web Services (AWS) Storage services for various purposes. Participants in the study recognized many main advantages of using AWS Storage.

Overview of the Situation

According to IDC's Global DataSphere, the quantity of data generated over the next three years will be higher than the amount of data created during the preceding 20 years, and the globe will create more than three times the amount of data over the next five years than it did in the previous five years. Simply put, firms are creating more data than ever because of digital technologies and procedures required to fulfill changing consumer behaviors and expectations. 

While not all of this data will be stored — much of it will be transient — as businesses seek new avenues of innovation and competitive advantage, they will look to store as much data as possible for as long as possible as they explore new ways to create value with it, provided this can be done cost-effectively. As a consequence, enterprises are trying to stay up with capacity expansion, data access needs, and the requirement to link more complex tools and services to this stored data.

Overview of AWS Storage

AWS is a well-established industry leader in cloud storage. IDC estimates that as of 1H20, AWS's share of the cloud storage market constituted more than half of the whole market and was three times greater than the nearest rival. This leadership is also evident at the product level; AWS offers the most comprehensive array of cloud storage services today, ranging from very low-cost object storage to high-performance block and shared file storage and fully managed storage services. Furthermore, AWS Storage services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) have proven to be incredibly popular, and the S3 storage API has become the de facto standard for developers writing to object storage.

The fact that AWS services, in general, are constantly expanding is critical in the context of this analysis, including services to enable optimization and automation of AWS usage, higher-layer use cases such as databases and cloud-native applications, and accelerating the time to market for new capabilities such as artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) and IoT. New capabilities are a primary driver for enterprises going to the cloud, and the availability of adjacent services to exploit their data drives them there. As of mid-2020, AWS provides approximately 175 cloud services (a growth of over 100 services in the past three years). These are supplemented by a larger program to help client onboarding via partners.

These complementary services aid in adopting more mature cloud services and customer use cases. Amazon Simple Storage Service, S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive, Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, Amazon FSx for Lustre, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), and the AWS Transfer Family are all part of AWS Storage. Amazon S3 is an object storage solution with scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Data lakes, websites, mobile apps, backup and restore, archiving, business applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics are examples of use cases. 

Other products in the solution set, S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive, are intended to provide safe, long-term, and low-cost Amazon S3 cloud storage for data archiving and long-term backup, with enhanced security and compliance features. Amazon EFS is a fully managed elastic NFS file system that can be used with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. FSx for Windows File Server offers fully controlled file storage through the industry-standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. 

FSx for Lustre is a fully managed service that delivers high-performance storage for compute-intensive applications (e.g., machine learning, high-performance computing, video rendering, and financial simulations). Amazon Elastic Block Store is a high-performance block storage service designed with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for both transactional and throughput-intensive workloads (e.g., relational and non-relational databases, enterprise applications, containerized applications, big data analytics engines, file systems, and media workflows).

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