AWS Sees Procurement As The Biggest Barrier To Cloud Adoption

It was not too long ago that companies and organizations saw security as the biggest barrier to cloud adoption, but the market has matured now, and buyers are more confident than ever.

Particularly, with the level of security that AWS provides.

However, according to the VP of worldwide public sector at Amazon Web Services, Teresa Carlson, getting the government buyers to change about procurement is now a bigger barrier for the company, as it seeks to maintain its lead in the more competitive than ever cloud domain.

She talked about this and more in an interview on the sidelines of the AWS London Summit, late last month at the ExCel Center.

Basically, the idea is to have AWS been seen as a local player for government buyers, rather than a US based technology giant. She also defended the approach Amazon has taken for data sovereignty and government requests for its customer data.

Some highlights:

“When I first started, it was all about security. It was completely about security. Today, it is not. Not that they are not concerned about security, of course they are. But, they now have a regime or mechanisms that they can plug into. They are much more knowledgeable. So, they have educated. They know now how to take a cloud based security compliant model and plug into that.

What they tell me are their big barriers today, if they are slower than they want to be, are two things. They want an acquisition vehicle that is easy for them to plug into. Mainly because their procurement officials are still more knowledgeable doing a CAPEX based systems, than OPEX based systems. So, they are still trying to figure out what is the mechanism if you are doing annual budgets? How do you budget for utility?”

The senior executive also touched upon how government has been the most challenging vertical for AWS, and how the cloud titan has taken a different approach to this.

Carlson rounded up the interview by talking about the confusion surrounding how Amazon protects customer data, and how the recent changes to US Rule 41 mean that agencies like the FBI no longer have to go to a specific jurisdiction to obtain a hacking warrant.

The whole interview is a pretty good read, so take a look at it at the link above.