The Cloud is Driving Innovation Faster Than Ever

I've spent this week at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference listening to a wide range of companies share success stories around how cloud computing has transformed their business. Each of their stories, while unique, shares the same basic recipe:

• Have an idea worth testing.
• Start with a small proof-of-concept, usually a single EC2 instance, which can be set up in minutes, not weeks.
• Measure interest in proof-of-concept and server capacity.
• Scale dynamically based on new demand, manually or automatically. This is where most companies with a traditional datacenter model will fail due to the lack of ability to procure and implement new hardware fast enough to meet growing demand.
• Keep growing, innovating, and working on things that matter, instead of worrying about infrastructure. Your datacenter does not differentiate you in the marketplace. The more manpower you spend managing it, the fewer resources you have to do things that matter.
• Win.

This recipe allows for a level of innovation that we haven't seen since the early days of the Internet. Cloud computing is offering us the ability to solve problems that were once impossible due to exceptionally high demands on computing power and storage.

Whether you are a start-up looking to build the next big product or a Fortune 100 enterprise looking to capture market share, the story is the same: the cloud lets you quickly iterate on your ideas without requiring the enormous up-front investment of hardware and people to manage it.

Increased innovation in cloud computing, low barriers to entry, lightning fast server provisioning, compute and storage costs that are approaching zero, and more businesses (large and small) coming on board are all combining to create a virtuous cycle that is causing an unprecedented increase in innovation across all industries.

Best of all, a large portion of the innovation we are witnessing bleeds over from the virtual world to the physical world. All sorts of companies are sprouting up that manufacture devices that aggregate multiple gigabits of information every second, compress it in real-time, and send it to a cloud provider for further processing.

Cloud computing is here to stay is acting as the single largest driver of innovation that we will see in our lifetimes. The sooner your organization gets on board, the sooner you can start reaping the infinite benefits the cloud has to offer.

The future is now.