Synthesis was a sponsor at the annual IT Web Cloud Summit held on the 8 February at Vodacom World in Midrand. The conference saw participants from a variety of industries ranging from banking to agriculture. Synthesis sponsored the urban café stand, where delegates could order coffee directly with ‘Alexa’, Amazon’s EchoDot. This service would then pass the order to the baristas who would make the coffee. Various AWS services including the Amazon Alexa Skill, DynamoDB, API Gateway and S3 were utilized to make this possible.
Darren Bak, Lead Business Analyst at Synthesis gave a talk around Cloud Economics at the conference. His presentation centered around building a strong business case for cloud migration. In the beginning of a cloud journey, the core reasons for going to be cloud should be apparent to the organisation. The Cloud journey requires business objectives with actual business outcomes. The easiest way to stimulate this conversation with technical executives is by asking this simple question: What would happen if you did nothing? Could your business afford the loose productivity and efficiency by not going to cloud? When looking at the economies of cloud, it is important to understand migration cost, TCO as well as the intangible benefits. In this regard, a cloud business case is essential in your journey to the cloud and should be incorporated into every step of the way. By understanding your existing on-premises ecosystem you will be able to lay the groundwork for an effective business case.
Michael Needham, Senior Manager Solutions Architecture from AWS gave an insightful talk around the journey to cloud as well as migration best practices. Michael also spoke about how customers should choose providers carefully and that have demonstrated knowledge in the industry and attestations to prove their core competencies. A key benefit AWS offers, is tangible value by operating on massive economies of scale and how customers can see cost savings with License Mobility to move existing enterprise software licenses to the cloud, which will provide value from current investments while still benefitting from the performance, scalability, and security that the AWS Cloud is known for. Lastly, he spoke about the AWS global network which acts as the super highway for cloud and a noteworthy mention that a region will be coming to South Africa in the near future.
Event Video
By: Jared Naude, Synthesis Software Technologies
