With the cloud revolution underway, everyone wants to know what computing will look like — and where the biggest market opportunities will be — when the dust settles. Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy has a few ideas.
In a talk with students and faculty at the University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering department last week, Jassy identified security as Amazon Web Services’ top priority.
“There’s so much security built into these cloud computing platforms today,” he said. “For us, it’s our No. 1 priority — it’s not even close, relative to anything else.”
He said Amazon is often asked by venture capitalists which types of cloud technologies they should invest in. He said, “If you believe, like we do, that very few companies will have their own data centers 10 years from now, that means all that computing is moving to the cloud. And if you believe that, there is a very healthy appetite in companies to have all kinds of security protections everywhere.”
Jassy referred to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that knocked out major websites, including Amazon and Twitter, in October. Hackers targeted an Internet of Things (IoT) device, which Jassy says is evidence of the demand for better systems to protect our increasingly connected world.
“Look at the big DDoS that happened to Dyn at the end of last year,” he said. “That was launched in one of those IoT devices and so the security challenges and the identity challenges and the communication challenges there, it’s just greenfield. I think there’s a lot of innovation and development ahead of us there.”
Jassy says AWS is working on some of those solutions, and will also partner with other companies.
“In the future, I think most companies’ on-premise footprint is not going to be servers,” he said. “It’s going to be these IoT edge devices that are proliferating in offices and factories, in oil fields and agricultural fields, in planes, in cars, just everywhere. If you think about the security associated with them, it’s totally different.”
