Rise of the cloud
Cloud technology is shaping today’s businesses into joining the digital transformation revolution, writes
ABLIND man walks to a bus stop along Thompson Road in Singapore to take a bus to Thomson Medical Centre 3km away. He is alone and there’s no one to help him. Luckily, the bus stop is a smart one that harnesses the latest technologies, such as cloud computing, big data, AI and machine learning to help the handicapped and tourists.
The bus stop is fitted with a smart camera and an Amazon Echo smart speaker powered by voice assistant Alexa.
With a touch of a button at the bus stop, the man asks what bus he should take to get to the hospital.
Upon hearing the man’s request, the bus stop (through the smart speaker) replies, telling him the bus number, when it will arrive at the bus stop, distance from the bus stop, an estimated journey time and fare.
Once the bus approaches the bus stop, and the smart camera senses it, the speaker will inform the man to get ready to board.
This scenario was just one of the presentations at the exhibition floor of Amazon Web Services Summit 2019 in Singapore.
It shows how technologies can benefit society.
The smart bus stop is just the tip of iceberg of cloud technology as a big chunk of it lies in the computing power in the “cloud”,
The AWS Summit 2019 brought together the cloud computing community to connect, collaborate and learn.
Some 10,000 attendees comprising technologists, partners, start-ups and the media from across Asean attended the twoday event with a focus on cloud technology.
During the keynote address, AWS (Asean) Managing Director Nick Walton explained how cloud technology is shaping today’s businesses and the role of AWS in enabling companies to join the digital transformation revolution.
“Cloud technology has paved the way for accelerated innovation, helping businesses remain relevant and competitive by lowering costs, and providing solutions to create and bring services to market quickly,” he said.
Cloud technology has played a pivotal role as an enabler in the digital economy, helping organisations innovate at speed and scale.
“The technology is helping organisations become nimble and agile at just a fraction of the cost of investing in premise solutions and products like servers.”
A lot of things drive companies towards digital transformation.
“Despite barriers to adoption, costs of entry in general are reducing as a result of globalisation of technology. As competition intensifies, customers’ behaviours are changing,” said Walton, adding that companies need the ability to test and rollout new products and services as quickly as possible and scale up as demand grows.
“Technology providers who have been serving them in the last 20 years just cannot keep up with the needs of today’s businesses anymore.
“There are cost advantages to running AWS — the ability to drive more reliability into your application at a much lower cost and, more importantly, time to market and innovate. These are the key benefits of AWS.”
Walton gave an example of Globe Telecom in the Philippines, which today runs more than 55 per cent of its infrastructure and petabytes of storage on the AWS platform.
“This has saved 30 per cent of costs compared to running on premise solutions. It sees application performance improvement and its provisioning time of new services has reduced from three months to only a few hours today. This means it can try new things or projects more quickly and do a lot of experiments. If it’s successful, it can scale it up.
“This allows it to offer more new services, like financial, and work with new partners, so it can realise its vision of becoming a digital lifestyle company and go far beyond than just a telcommunications company.”