Transforming Your Business with AWS

Getting the Most Out of Using AWS to Modernize and Innovate Your Digital Services

Philippe Abdoulaye

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781119815976
• eBook ISBN: 9781119816157
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Cyber Security
• Index: Computer Science

Expert guidance on how to use Amazon Web Services to supercharge your digital services business

In Transforming Your Business with AWS: Getting the Most Out of Using AWS to Modernize and Innovate Your Digital Services, renowned international consultant and sought-after speaker Philippe Abdoulaye delivers a practical and accessible guide to using Amazon Web Services to modernize your business and the digital services you offer. This book provides you with a concrete action plan to build a team capable of creating world-class digital services and long-term competitive advantages.

You'll discover what separates merely average digital service organizations from the truly outstanding, as well as how moving to the cloud will enable your business to deliver your services faster, better, and more efficiently.

This book also includes:

• A comprehensive overview of building industry-leading digital service delivery capabilities, including discussions of the development lifecycle, best practices, and AWS-based development infrastructure
• Explanations of how to implement a digital business transformation strategy
• An exploration of key roles like DevOps Continuous Delivery, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Integration, Automation, and DevSecOps
• Hands-on treatments of AWS application management tools, including Elastic Beanstalk, CodeDeploy, and CodePipeline

Perfect for executives, managers, and other business leaders attempting to clarify and implement their organization's digital vision and strategy, Transforming Your Business with AWS is a must-read reference that answers the "why" and, most importantly, the "how, " of digital transformation with Amazon Web Services.

Part I
Understanding the Digital Transformation Challenges

Companies that successfully complete their digital transformation have all adopted a holistic approach that considers cloud computing, agile operational models, and digital products and services as the epicenter of their business model. These companies are correct because ongoing digital disruptions are changing industry structures and by extension the way that companies do business.

Part I, consisting of Chapters 1–4, highlights the changes introduced by the growing digital economy and its impact on businesses, but above all, it shows why it is urgent for companies to transform as a whole the four pillars of their business model: technology, people, processes, and organizational structure.

Chapter 1, “The Digital Economy's Challenges, Opportunities, and Relevance of AWS,” addresses the digital economy's challenges and opportunities with which businesses have increasingly had to deal with, and it introduces the concept of AWS universal architecture to highlight the operational and technological features that make AWS the essential competitive advantage.

Chapter 2, “What Is a Digital Product?” and Chapter 3, “Digital Product and Service Development Challenges,” discuss the second key part of the digital transformation initiative: digital products and services and the development approach. These chapters elaborate on the digital products and services building blocks, the overall ecosystem, and the underlying AWS technology stack.

In Chapter 3, a framework for evaluating digital products and services development platforms is presented, which aids in improving quality, efficiency, and time to market.

Chapter 4, “Industrializing Digital Product and Service Development,” discusses how companies can leverage DevOps, AWS architectural design patterns, and agile and object-oriented methodologies to industrialize their digital products and services development process.

CHAPTER 1
The Digital Economy's Challenges, Opportunities, and Relevance of AWS

Digital transformation isn’t a technology makeover. It’s a business revolution.

—Kaan Turnali

It's a fact that the expansion of the digital economy is accelerating, it’s affecting industries and businesses worldwide and confirming its disruptive nature.

Businesses will have to adapt to the changes and requirements of their competitive environment.

Although the habit in IT is to overlook business considerations in favor of rapid technology implementation, the fact is, if you don't understand how the digital economy impacts your company, chances are that you will miss out on the benefits of going digital and fail.

This disruptive digital economy affects your industry and by extension your company's business and operational models; without a 360-degree view into how far your work organization, processes, and underpinning IT have been made irrelevant, the only thing you'll get is a technology platform disconnected from your businesses' priorities.

Make no mistake, without a big picture mindset that highlights not only the challenges but also the business opportunities that you can take advantage of using cloud-based solutions such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), there is no way that your company can survive the economic crisis.

This chapter discusses the expanding digital economy's challenges and opportunities, as well as its impact on the business and IT; it highlights the benefits that businesses can derive from cloud-based solutions, including AWS, to build successful digital products and services development organizations.

Understanding the Digital Economy's Impacts

We're in the midst of a pandemic that's confirming four trends that industry experts have been observing in connection with the digital economy. Businesses will deal directly with their industry's disruption, and tackling issues head-on including work from home, ecommerce, data science, and innovation are among the competitive advantages they will need to survive and thrive. These trends are the new business normals. Let's discuss them now.

Surviving Disruptions Are Your Business's Primary Challenge

The first new normal is the notion that the conditions for frequent industry disruptions are here to stay. The reason is that the world is in the midst of a wave of innovation that's expected to last for decades. This will lead to repeated disruptions forcing businesses to adapt. That's what is meant by digital disruption and that the COVID-19 crisis should be understood as an industry disrupter.

As you can see in Figure 1.1, there's a correlation between the pandemic and ongoing job destruction. In 2020, in the United States and France, unemployment hit a yearly total of 8.9 percent, in Italy 11 percent, and in Brazil 13.4 percent. As you probably have realized, surviving industry disruptions will be part of your business challenges over the next three to five years.

Figure 1.1: COVID-19 impact on unemployment

Source: International Monetary Fund (IMF)

Understanding the Digital Economy's Opportunities

The second new normal is the emergence of work from home, ebusiness, data science, and innovation as the digital economy's opportunity enablers. A quick look at the handful of companies doing well in this crisis shows that in addition to competitive pricing, superior customer exp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Introduction
• Part I: Understanding the Digital Transformation Challenges
• Part II: Digitizing the Business Model Using AWS
• Part III: Developing World-Class Digital Products and Services Using AWS
• Index
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the Author
• About the Technical Editor
• Acknowledgments
• End User License Agreement