Why Amazon Web Services is bringing innovation across the UK

Amazon’s transition into an infrastructure giant has gone from strength to strength in recent years, as the company Amazon Web Services (AWS) arm becomes one of the most important technology firms in the world.

With AWS securing high-profile customers and partners around the globe, the company’s presence in the UK is growing markedly, as shown off at its recent Innovation Day event in London.

“It's really interesting to see how far we've come with the adoption of AWS in large enterprises - five years ago, you could describe them maybe as peripheral projects, but many of these customers are now putting AWS to work in application areas and workloads that are really important to them,” Ian Massingham, technical and developer evangelism at AWS, told TechRadar Pro.

“It's a really common theme among enterprise customers here in the UK - it's no longer the edge of the enterprise that's being moved to the cloud, it's core applications that are really integral to the customer proposition.”

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Rapid innovation

AWS launched its UK region two years ago, and has seen a surge in adoption across the three main areas of public sector, enterprise and start-ups. The likes of EDF, EasyJet and Nationwide took to the stage at the company's London event to speak about their usage, demonstrating the range of scale AWS can offer.

Massingham attributes this success partly to the fact that AWS does not launch new services for the sake of it - instead working back from customer needs. He says that 95 percent of new launches came directly from customer requests - not a bad figure given that AWS launched 1430 new services last year.

“That is rapid innovation across a range of different fronts,” he notes, “we have this broad scale of innovation.”

With the UK set to encounter major upheaval next spring, how can AWS help its customers stay on top of their changing data and regulatory needs?

Massingham notes that AWS allows customers in the UK the option to keep their data within or outside of the EU, depending on their post-Brexit needs, noting that, “we're focusing on servicing customers and their needs whatever the outcome.”

Pre-existing use of the AWS regions in Dublin and Germany have also meant that many customers here have enjoyed significant drops in latency with the growth of the UK region, a trend Massingham hopes will continue in the future.

Ultimately, the company is looking to provide the infrastructure backbone for customers of all sizes dedicated to creating the next big innovation.

“We have a lot of customers that are on the cusp of doing something really special”, Massingham noted.