Monday, August 14, 2017

‘Corporaties moeten inhaalslag maken om aan Europese privacywet te voldoen’

‘Corporaties moeten inhaalslag maken om aan Europese privacywet te voldoen’

Door augustus 14, 2017Privacy, Woningcorporatie 


In mei 2016 werd de Europese privacywet aangenomen. Corporaties kregen toen twee jaar de tijd om aan deze nieuwe wet te voldoen. Wat is minder dan één jaar voor de live-gang van de wet de stand van zaken in de corporatiesector? CorporatieGids.nl ging in gesprek met Joyce de Jong van Audittrail, en sprak met haar over de gevolgen van de wet en hoe corporaties aan de nieuwe wetgeving kunnen voldoen.
“De kern van de nieuwe Europese wetgeving is dat Europese burgers weer controle krijgen over de eigen persoonsgegevens,” begint Joyce. “Burgers hebben het recht om te weten wat er met hun gegevens wordt gedaan. Organisaties worden gedwongen dat in kaart te brengen, er transparant over te zijn en de burger te faciliteren in het uitoefenen van haar rechten. En dat vergt nogal wat van organisaties.”

Inhaalslag

De wetgeving is niet geheel nieuw. Een deel van de regels stond ook al beschreven in de Wet bescherming persoonsgegevens uit 2001. “Door het gebrek aan toezicht werd deze wet echter slecht nageleefd. Daardoor moeten organisaties een inhaalslag maken. En dat kost tijd. Wij zien nog geen corporatie die nu helemaal aan de Wbp en AVG voldoet, al zijn er verschillende heel goed op weg. Daarbij is er natuurlijk geen sprake van een eenmalige exercitie. De Privacy Officer zal blijvend moeten toezien dat de wettelijke regels gevolgd worden.”
Corporaties moeten inhaalslag maken om aan Europese privacywet te voldoen | Audittrail
De Europese privacywet treedt op 25 mei 2018 in werking. Wanneer corporaties dan niet aan de regels voldoen, kunnen hoge boetes worden uitgedeeld. “Er zijn nog geen boetes uitgedeeld, maar die gaan er uiteindelijk zeker komen. De extreem hoge boetes van 20 miljoen euro of vier procent van de wereldwijde jaaromzet zijn vooral bedoeld om giganten als Facebook en Google af te schrikken, maar ook bij corporaties kunnen de boetes pijn doen. Daarnaast kunnen corporaties bij fouten ook door huurders aansprakelijk worden gesteld.”

Documentatieplicht

Eén van de lastige punten van de Europese privacywet, is volgens Joyce dat corporaties in kaart moeten brengen hoe er met persoonsgegevens wordt omgegaan. “Dat is een omvangrijke documentatieplicht. Het verwerkingsregister, waarin alle processen waar persoonsgegevens worden gebruikt staan vastgelegd, is daar onderdeel van. Het vullen van zo´n register kan veel tijd kosten, maar resulteert wel in een goed overzicht van je risico’s en compliance. Zo kun je in één overzicht zien met welke partijen je gegevens uitwisselt en toetsen of die uitwisseling aan de wet voldoet.”
“Verder is privacybewustzijn bij de medewerkers enorm belangrijk. Anders blijven datalekken onopgemerkt en blijft de kans bestaan dat er toch gegevens uitgewisseld worden, zonder dat aan de juiste voorwaarden voldaan wordt.”

Bestuur

Een beter bewustzijn rondom privacy begint bij het bestuur, legt Joyce uit. “Die moet tijd en middelen beschikbaar stellen om de inhaalslag mogelijk te maken. Daarnaast adviseren wij altijd om de rol van Privacy Officer binnen een corporatie te beleggen. Die is zowel intern als extern het eerste aanspreekpunt voor privacy, heeft de coördinatie bij datalekken en zorgt ervoor dat de documentatie up-to-date is en de organisatie compliant blijft.”

Persoonlijk stappenplan

Om corporaties te begeleiden de uitdagingen rondom de Europese privacywet aan te gaan, biedt Audittrail een persoonlijk stappenplan aan. “Veel corporaties gaan bewust met persoonsgegevens om, maar doen dit op basis van gezond verstand alleen. Helaas voldoe je daarmee niet aan de wetgeving, je moet dit immers aantonen. Uit onze nulmetingen volgt daarom een plan van aanpak, waarbij de documentatie eerst op orde wordt gebracht en de grootste risico’s beperkt. Daarna kijken we of de werkwijze van de corporatie in overeenstemming is met de wetgeving, en waar nodig maatregelen getroffen moeten worden. We houden daarbij een logische volgorde aan die zoveel mogelijk synchroon loopt met de bijbehorende informatiebeveiligingsmaatregelen. We kijken bijvoorbeeld niet alleen naar welke informatie uitgewisseld wordt, maar ook of dat op een veilige manier gebeurt.”

Tijdig voldoen aan de Europese privacywet

Joyce sluit het gesprek af door te stellen dat er de afgelopen jaren erg veel is veranderd op het gebied van persoonsgegevens. “Door middel van het uitwisselen van gegevens, dataverrijking en profileren wordt geprobeerd een steeds completer plaatje van de huurder te verkrijgen. Vaak met goede intenties, maar wel met grote gevolgen voor privacy. De wetgeving – en vooral het toezicht – liep lange tijd daarop achter, iets wat nu niet meer het geval is. Daarnaast worden bedreigingen van buitenaf ook steeds groter, denk bijvoorbeeld aan ransomware-aanvallen. Hoe langer corporaties wachten met het op orde brengen van de privacy, hoe lastiger het wordt die inhaalslag te maken en hoe groter het risico wordt. Daarom willen we corporaties op het hart drukken om tijdig aan de nieuwe wetgeving te voldoen, om hoge kosten of boetes te voorkomen én om de gegevens van de huurders, corporatie en eigen medewerkers te beschermen.”

Bron: Johan van den Beld |  CorporatieGids | CorporatieMedia – 14 augustus 2017
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Protecting Your Brand From The Cyber Bandits In The Age Of Hacking






Protecting Your Brand From The Cyber Bandits In The Age Of Hacking

Augus12, 2017
Richard Levick , Contributor
I write about the intersection of business and public affairs. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
This is the fourth in a series of columns addressing what companies can do to learn from activist investors, NGOs, the plaintiffs’ bar, and others to defend and grow their brands.
No corporate entity or institution – no matter how pure of heart – is immune from cyberattacks. When it comes to wreaking havoc or scamming money, cyber bandits are equal-opportunity thugs: if the cash or cause is right, they’ll go after anybody or anything.
Just ask some of the biggest companies in the world: Fedex, Maersk, Mondelez, and Merck, all of which have missed 2017 earnings projections because of ransomware attacks. The assault on Merck was so crippling that it was forced to halt production of its key drug lines, a disruption likely to undercut profits for the rest of the year.
A Merck sign stands in front of the company's building in Summit, New Jersey. (Photo by Kena Betancur/Getty Images)


Or ask these restaurant chains – Wendy’s, Noodles, and CiCi’s Pizza – which have been thwarted by recent breaches of customer payment information, malware contamination, and point-of-purchase hacking.
Or these technology companies – Yahoo, LinkedIn, MacKeeper (a performance-optimizing software for Apple computers), and Dropbox – which have had proprietary information on millions of their customers compromised.
Or the Hyatt chain, which revealed a year ago that malware had corrupted the customer credit card systems at 250 hotels.
Or Citibank, which was flummoxed by a vengeful ex-employee whose malicious tampering shut down nine of its 10 global control center routers.
Cyberattacks are not just getting more pervasive, malevolent, and destructive – they’re threatening the foundations of our economy and democracy. “Hackers with possible ties to nation-states continue to target infrastructure as well as systems for political insight,” warns a report from the Heritage Foundation that documents the nefarious activities of cyber criminals associated with the Russian government’s Russia Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) and Federal Security Service (FSB).

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Protecting Your Brand From The Cyber Bandits In The Age Of Hacking
Richard Levick , Contributor
I write about the intersection of business and public affairs. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
Continued from page 1
Cyber warfare experts at the FBI and Department of Homeland Security are worried about far more than Russia. Not long ago, hackers tied to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps tried to gain control of the sluice system at New York State’s Bowman Dam and nearly succeeded.
U.S. authorities believe that global activists and radical extremists, including ISIS, are launching cyberattacks against corporations and government agencies at the same time they’ve learned how to weaponize social media.
Paul Ferrillo, who helps direct Weil Gotshal & Manges LLP’s Cybersecurity, Data Privacy & Information Management practice, advises that, “There are tough times ahead for companies that are not prepared. With sophisticated exploits readily available on the Internet, it is hard to tell the difference between nation-state activity and cybercriminal activity – they are equally well equipped to do harm.”
Eddie Block, who helps lead Gardere Wynne Sewell LLP’s cybersecurity practice and served as the Chief Information Security Officer for the State of Texas, observes that, “Companies that ignore the threats to their technology infrastructures are sticking their heads in the sand. Cyberattacks are a ‘when not if’ event. Developing and testing response plans should be a key business priority.”


Matt Comyns, the managing partner of Caldwell Partners’ Cybersecurity Practice and an expert in helping companies institute anti-hacking measures, adds, “Jobs that focused on cybersecurity were once considered to be low-level and not strategic. Companies must now elevate those roles to keep pace with the serious risks posed by cyber threats. The best cyber leaders are much more than tactical technicians. They put cyber risk into real business terms that boards and C-level executives can understand.”
Not every company can put their employees through intensive off-campus training to contain cyberattacks. But here’s a quick Ferrillo-Block-Comyns- Levick prescription for what every company should be contemplating on the cyber front.
• Prepare, test, and evaluate an incident response plan (IRP), business continuity plan (BCP), and a crisis communications plan to streamline the investigation and remediation process and buoy communications with shareholders, customers, and other stakeholders when a breach does occur;
• Map data flows to assess where critical, personal, or regulated data is stored and how it is transmitted;
• Conduct a privacy impact assessment to assess depth and vulnerability of data (wherever it is located) and how it can be protected;
• Educate employees, executives, and board members on such cybersecurity must-knows as breach response, spear phishing, social media best practices, and password protocols;
• Prepare internal policies dealing with privacy issues at work (social media use, workplace surveillance, monitoring internet activity, etc.); and
• Get back to basics, such as timely patching of software and a regular back-up process for your networks and desktops.
Institutions need to do much more, of course. But nothing, no matter how comprehensive, guarantees 100 percent protection from cyber bandits.
In today’s world, cyberattacks are as inevitable as sluggish quarters and bumpy shareholder meetings. The companies that steel themselves for the cyber turbulence to come will be best equipped to contain the damage and recover quickly enough to make their numbers and return to normal operations.
# # #
Richard Levick, Esq., @richardlevick, is Chairman and CEO of LEVICK. He is a frequent television, radio, online, and print commentator.


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Friday, July 21, 2017

Amazon's $12 billion cloud is seeing its 'first-ever downtick' in momentum, according to Deutsche Bank

mazon's $12 billion cloud is seeing its 'first-ever downtick' in momentum, according to Deutsche Bank

Matt Weinberger,Business Insider 

Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy(Amazon Web Services CEO Andy JassyAmazon) In a note to clients earlier this week, Deutsche Bank trimmed its price target for Amazon from $1,150 down to $1,135, on fears that the company's $12 billion Amazon Web Services cloud-computing business faces challenges ahead.
Amazon Web Services pioneered what the tech industry calls "public cloud": Customers rent functionally unlimited supercomputing power from Amazon's own super-efficient data centers on a pay-as-you-go basis. It's sometimes cheaper, and often more flexible, than maintaining servers of your own.
Generally speaking, Deutsche Bank remains bullish on the future prospects for AWS. Companies of all shapes and sizes are either starting their businesses on Amazon Web Services, or moving some (or all) of their existing infrastructure up to Amazon's cloud.
The problem, writes Deutsche, is that their conversations with Amazon's network of partners and specialists indicates that migration of existing businesses to the cloud is happening at a slower rate than originally anticipated. When Amazon reports earnings on July 27, it's expecting AWS to show 39% growth, versus its original projection of 40%.
The reason for Deutsche's skepticism comes from a visit to an AWS Summit conference in London, where analysts heard its "first-ever downtick from partners around the pace of large European enterprise cloud migrations." When Deutsche checked with its contacts in the United States, it heard the same was happening domestically.
Deutsche wants to be clear that it's still projecting a bright sunny future for the public cloud in general, and AWS in particular. Still, with Amazon Web Services such a cornerstone of the bigger Amazon picture, this little blip could lead to bigger problems down the road, should the trend continue.
Amazon is expected to announce quarterly earnings on Thursday, July 27 after the bell. Wall Street is expecting earnings of $1.42 per share on $37.18 billion in revenue.
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Saturday, March 12, 2016

Technology

Amazon's cloud boss told us something that should terrify a $140 billion industry

Rob Price,Business Insider 2 hours 8 minutes ago
(Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images) If you build enterprise hardware, start freaking out. There's no question Amazon is turning the screws on the $140 billion data-center-tech industry.
Amazon has grown to become the largest player in the rapidly growing cloud industry as its cloud platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), celebrates its 10-year anniversary. 
And in the process, AWS has sent shockwaves through the traditional enterprise sector.
In an interview with Business Insider, Werner Vogels — the CTO of Amazon in charge of AWS — explained why hardware companies aren't going to get any respite any time soon.

Hardware builders are getting squeezed out the game

Right now, instead of buying all of their own computers, networks, and software, businesses large and small are opting to rent it all from cloud-computing vendors. That spells bad news for companies like IBM, HP, Dell, EMC, Cisco, the hardware makers selling companies the servers, storage, and management software.
Normally, these IT companies would simply shift their sales efforts toward the newer, growing market, trying to sell their wares to the cloud-service providers. These providers are building new data centers and installing new hardware at a rapid pace.
The problem is the cloud providers are building their own instead of buying it all from IT vendors. And they are coming up with new designs for faster, cheaper, more efficient hardware, too. Facebook is a prime example of this with its Open Compute Project, in which engineers openly share their homegrown hardware designs with anyone who wants them, and it has become an industry phenom.
Werner Vogels(Flickr / Interop Events ) Werner Vogels, Amazon's CTO.
Likewise, Amazon also designs and builds its own server and network infrastructure to power its AWS cloud. "To be able to operate at scale like we do," Werner Vogels explains, "it makes sense to start designing your own server infrastructure as well as your network. There is great advantages in [doing so]."
There are two key advantages for Amazon: flexibility and cost.
"To be able to create network layouts that are unique for our particular business" is extremely useful, Vogels says.
"Remember, this whole business is about shifting capex to opex, but Amazon still as to put up the capex, and this is a capex-intensive business for us. So anything we can do to increase the cost efficiency of our operations immediately benefits our customers," he explains.
To decode that a little, he's saying that by using AWS, businesses turn their IT into a monthly operating expense. But Amazon still has to cough up huge chunks of capital-expense cash in advance to outfit its data center, so it's motivated to find ways to do that as cheaply as possible.
He adds: "Our standards are so high we can't just go with off-the-shelf buildings or networks or power — we really need to make sure we have the highest possible standards."
And that's why as IT shifts to Amazon's cloud, traditional IT players' slices of the pie are shrinking.

This trend is only going to accelerate

Amazon's message is particularly worrying for those traditional IT vendors because it doesn't just apply to itself. By Vogels' logic, anyone above a certain size will eventually find it better to start building their own hardware.
That's already playing out with Facebook's OCP project. Although Amazon hasn't publicly said it is working with the OCP, just about every large cloud company has signed up, including Apple, Microsoft and, more recently, Google. And so have some very large enterprises like Goldman Sachs.
While vendors like Dell and HP are involved in OCP, they aren't in the driver's seat. For the first time, that seat is filled with the companies who are using the equipment, not the vendors  selling it.
Vogels believes the move to the cloud will get even more intense (and most market researchers agree with him).
It has already reshaped how startups are launched.
(Apple) These days, all you need to launch a startup is a laptop.
"The startup world is radically different today than it was 10 years ago. A typical investment 10 years ago, to be able to get a business off the ground that needs to scale in one way or another, was around $5 million. Today, for $50,000-$100,000, you can get yourself a pretty good businesses started ... the rise of the whole startup culture is largely driven by cloud." The same thing is happening now to established companies, even those who previously ran their own private data centers.
"Moving over to the cloud allows them [companies] to have their engineers focus on things that matter for the business," he tells us.

'This isn't a winner-takes all market'

(Flickr CC/Henry Burrows) Not Amazon Web Services.
Vogels doesn't think much of some of his competitors, claiming they are all years behind. Although he wouldn't name names, most people see the cloud as a race between market leader Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, with other players like IBM also in the mix.
"If you look at other cloud providers in the market, there's quite a few of them still sort of in the phase where AWS was five, six years ago — in 2010 — at the moment we were still much more focused on the infrastructure side of things than the sort of rich collection of services."
But he acknowledges that there's room for more cloud providers besides AWS, although he, once again, won't name names.
"This is not a winner-takes all market," Vogel says. "I think given the changes we've seen in the last 10 years it's hard to predict which are the players that will be left in 10 years from now, or who will be the main players in the market. I definitely think AWS will be there and have a prominent role in that world."
If Vogels' predictions are right, it doesn't matter from the perspective of the traditional enterprise sector who comes out on top: Whoever it is, they'll end up building their own tech.
"Do I think there will be less and less data centers over time?" Vogels says. "Yes, absolutely."
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Friday, March 11, 2016

Why AWS dominates the cloud services market

Why AWS dominates the cloud services market

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In the latest Magic Quadrant report released by Gartner last year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) maintained its position as the king of cloud Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers. Followed by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, the three cloud providers are often referred to as ‘hyperscale vendors.’
What was more shocking about the news was that AWS had more than 10 times the computing capacity in use than the next 14 largest cloud companies combined.

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In addition, AWS announced a metric that was hard to contend with: over 1 million active enterprise users, not individuals. This was the one metric that not even Microsoft was being transparent about when it reported on its numbers.
So how come no-one has managed to oust AWS from its IaaS throne? Below we provide you with the comparison analysis supported by Gartner, and the five case studies of AWS taken from Fortune 500 and Unicorn companies.

Magic Quadrant comparison

Every year, Gartner published a positioning analysis for competing players in the major technology markets, called Gartner Magic Quadrant.
Using graphical assistance and a set of evaluation criteria, a Magic Quadrant helps you quickly determine how technology providers are executing their visions and how well they are performing against Gartner’s market view.
In all types of Magic Quadrant, two axes representing Gartner’s evaluation criteria – ability to execute and completeness of vision – provide four dimensions to map the competing players: Leaders, Visionaries, Niche Players and Challengers.
Leaders execute well against their current vision and are well positioned for tomorrow, and Visionaries understand where the market is going or have a vision for changing market rules, but do not yet execute as well as Leaders.
Challengers execute well today or may dominate a large segment, but don’t show an understanding of market direction, while Niche Players focus successfully on a small segment and do not out-innovate or outperform others.
Credit: Gartner
Gartner: Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service 2015
So, what did Gartner see as Amazon’s strengths?
  • Diverse customer base
  • Broadest range of use cases (cloud native applications, e-business hosting, general business applications, enterprise applications, development environments and batch computing)→ mostly chosen for strategic adoption
  • Large tech partner ecosystem including software vendors that integrated their solutions with AWS
  • Extensive network of partners that provide app development expertise, managed service and professional services such as data center migration
  • Richest array of IaaS and Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities
  • Rapid service offerings and higher-level solutions expansion

However, Gartner also offered some downsides to Amazon’s offering:
  • Can be a complex vendor to manage
  • Charges separately for optional items that are sometimes bundled with competing offerings
  • Tier-based customer support depending on chosen support purchases, rather than ‘relationship’ or size-of-spend based
  • Broad capabilities mean services that attract less customers’ interest will not get the same level of continued investment by AWS
  • New capabilities often compete with products and services from AWS partners that potentially leads to ecosystem conflicts

Amazon has been in the business the longest time compared to the other two giants, Microsoft and Google, and this gave them a first-mover advantage in what Amazon has called the cloud virtuous cycle: value based pricing → more customers → more usage → more infrastructure → economies of scale → lower infrastructure costs → continued innovation/back to value.
Here’s why big companies listed in the Fortune 500 and Unicorn chose to use AWS for fulfilling their cloud needs.

Huge capacity means timely solutions for your business challenges

Yes, yes, we have been talking about its computing capacity since the very beginning. But how big is it? Okay, let’s do some math.
AWS placed its data centers across 33 availability zones within 12 regions worldwide. Each availability zone has at least one data center (some have as many as six) that has redundant power for stability, networking and connectivity. In each data center, there are between 50,000 to 80,000 servers with up to 102 Tbps bandwidth.
If you assume an average of three data centers per zone and 65,000 servers per data center, you will end up having 6.4 million servers worldwide. For those of you who care about availability and performance of their applications in the cloud, the huge computing capacity of AWS ensures higher fault tolerance and low latency.

AWS Global Infrastructure
Credit: Amazon Web Services
Pfizer (56th on Fortune 500), a global medicine company, uses Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to handle its peak computing needs in a secure environment. With VPC, it carries out computations for the Worldwide Research and Development (WRD) division. That is responsible for supporting large-scale data analysis, research projects, clinical analytics and modeling.
Dr. Michael Miller, Head of High Performance Computing (HPC) for WRD explained, “Research can be unpredictable, especially as the on-going science raises new questions.” Assisted by VPC, he can now lead the WRD team to respond to these challenges by providing the computing means that exceed the dedicated HPC system.

Automatically match load demands on your critical, high volume applications

Expedia, a leading online travel company (458th on Fortune 500), has to deal with vasts amount of data when it comes to providing leisure and business travel to customers worldwide.
One big challenge with handling all that data is how to maintain critical, high volume applications without worrying about the infrastructure stability.
One of the high volume applications is the Global Deals Engine (GDE), an engine that delivers deals to its online partners and allows them to create custom websites and apps using Expedia’s Application Program Interface (API) and product inventory tools.
Expedia Global Deals Engine Architecture on AWS
Credit: Amazon Web Services
Expedia Global Deals Engine Architecture on AWS
With GDE, Expedia has to process approximately 240 requests per second. Considering the huge amount of requests they have to handle from this engine alone, they decided to run it on AWS because of Auto Scaling.
Murari Gopalan, technology director of Expedia, said, “The advantage of AWS is that we can use Auto Scaling to match load demand instead of having to maintain capacity for peak load in traditional data centers.”
Auto Scaling on AWS helps you automatically adjust the number of servers added or removed depending on the load. Auto Scaling can also detect when a server is unhealthy, terminate it, and launch another server to replace it. This way, Expedia achieved what it wanted: Stable infrastructure.

Granular-level costs monitoring improves ROI assessment

In the world of cereal industry, profits are tight. Even for a company like Kellogg (210th on Fortune 500), every dollar spent usually goes to the marketing division for coupons, special offers, sponsorships, even cereal placement on the grocery store shelf.
To stay competitive, Kellogg needed to invest in new IT infrastructure to run dozens of complex data simulations on TV ad spend, digital marketing and other promotions and keep tabs on the costs spent on the new IT investment.
So they decided to invest in AWS with its SAP Hana environment since this infrastructure could accommodate terabytes of data, scale according to needs and yet stay within budget.
Kellogg SAP HANA Deployment Architecture on AWS
Credit: Amazon Web Services
Kellogg SAP HANA Deployment Architecture on AWS
In addition to this, thanks to Amazon CloudWatch, Kellogg could allocate costs to each department based on their infrastructure use. Stover Mcllwain, senior director of IT Infrastructure Engineering at Kellogg, said, “AWS breaks down usage and cost to such a granular level that we can identify which costs come from which department, like a toll model.”
This way, Kellogg could make better decisions around the capacity each department needed to avoid waste, and assess the true return on investment of AWS.

Quick storage scalability without incurring long lead times for upgrades

Spotify (15th on Unicorn list), the leading music streaming service, offers instant access to over 16 million licensed songs and it’s growing. Due to its huge collection of songs, Spotify faces the eternal challenge of cataloging not only yesterday’s and today’s popular tracks, but also those that will be released in the future.
Operations director for Spotify, Emil Fredrisson, explained that Spotify needed a storage solution that can scale quickly, keeping up with the pace of their library growth.
To give you a figure why Spotify needs to do this, they add over 20,000 tracks a day to its catalogue. Quick scalability is a key and a long lead time (amount of time that elapses between when a process starts and when it’s completed) is out of the question.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provided what they were asking for: Short lead time and scalability.
In the past, establishing new storage solution required several months of preparation, but with Amazon S3, Spotify can spontaneously adjust to any alterations in user demand.
Regarding S3 benefits, Frederiksson commented, “By removing the restrictions incurred by in-house solutions, we enabled much faster development and deployment cycles.”
He also added, “The ability to go from a system architecture design and capacity requirements to an online and working production system in very little time is fantastic.”

Vast solutions for different needs all under one umbrella

What Airbnb (3rd on Unicorn list) experienced with AWS was all of the previous four benefits combined and more.
Only a year after Airbnb launched, they decided to migrate almost all of their cloud computing to AWS due to a service administration problem with its previous provider. The initial interest was triggered because of the ease of building up more servers without having to contact anyone and without having minimum usage commitments. This, however, was just the beginning.
As the company continued to grow, so was its infrastructure demand. Right now, Airbnb uses 200 Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) instances (AWS package for different needs) for its application, memcache (a system used to speed up websites), and search servers.
Combine the above with Amazon S3’s ability to host backups and static files including 10TB of user pictures, and Amazon CloudWatch, which allows the company to easily supervise all of its EC2 instances, meant Airbnb can keep the lights on for its millions of customers.
To maintain stability, Airbnb uses Elastic Load Balancing to automatically distribute incoming traffic between multiple instances. Additionally, Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce allows the company to easily process and analyze 50GB of data daily, and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) simplifies the time-consuming administrative tasks typically associated with databases.
Such tasks include, but not limited to, replication (the frequent electronic copying of data from a database in one computer or server to another so that all users share the same level of information) and scaling. It is also noteworthy to know that Airbnb was able to complete the entire database migration to RDS and only experience 15 minutes of downtime.
Thanks to the different solutions provided by AWS, Airbnb saved the expense of at least one operation’s position and gained increased flexibility to meet demands for future growth.

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