AWS Enterprise Summit

Last Tuesday, I was together with two colleagues at the AWS Enterprise summit in the World Forum in The Hague. This was for me the second AWS summit that I attended.  The event started with a keynote from Ian Massingham, Chief Evangelist (EMEA), AWS. Ian spoke about the impact that cloud has on enterprise IT. After the keynote, there was a plenary session by Hans Koolen, Senior Director, Philips IT Global Services. He posed the statement that a private cloud doesn't exist.

After the keynote and the plenary session, there was lunch break and a possibility to visit the Partner & Solutions Expo. During the whole event the Hands-On labs were also available.  The afternoon started with two breakout tracks, management and technical. Both of the tracks consisted of 4 sessions. I followed three sessions in the management track and one session in the technical track. The first track that I followed, from the Management Track, was the session Starting your Journey to the Cloud. Very interesting session, addressing the points which you had to pay attention to when starting the journey to the cloud. The slides can be found here. After this session, I followed a Technical Track session, End-user Computing on AWS. This session was about AWS WorkSpaces, running your desktop on AWS, and also about using AWS WorkMail. The slides can be found here. During the break I visited the Partner & Solution Expo and spoke some of the people. After the break there were two session left. I took both of the sessions from the Management track. First I attend the session Cost Optimization at Scale. This was an interesting session addressing the possibilities that AWS offers to optimize your cost.  The speaker addressed amongst other things the tools that AWS offers, the difference between instances. He also spoke about the comparison between the cost of running your own data center compared to running the workloads in the AWS cloud. Slides of this presentations can found here. As last I followed the Information Security by Design in AWS session. This was also a very interesting session. This session was, amongst other things, about compliance, AWS  assurance programs  and AWS compliance certifications. Very useful information when talking to customers about the cloud. The day end with a network reception and again the possibility to speak to the people on the Partner & Solution expo. I especially liked the last two breakout sessions. I think they were very useful and I can use the knowledge in my job when advising businesses in their journey to the cloud.