Carlos Carús: "Cloud computing is helping to democratise technology".

If we had to look for an expert in Cloud Computing, surely more than one would name Carlos Carús. Carús, in addition to being part of the IMMUNE faculty, is the Chief Technology Officer of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Spain and Portugal.

In fact, before starting this interview, he explains what Cloud Computing is. A concept that can sometimes be fuzzy, but it is important to understand:

"Basically, the idea of Cloud Computing is the ability of organisations (private and public companies, start-ups, all kinds of entities...) to consume technological resources. I mean everything you can imagine: servers, virtual machines, storage capacity, databases, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, IoT solutions... Technological solutions that are consumed on a pay-per-use model. You pay only when you actually use that technology. This is a differentiating element.

Technology that "you're only going to get on demand" and which has been key this year...

1. If there is one thing we have learned in 2021, it is that there is a demand for digitisation. And, among the different digitising actions, Cloud Computing stands out. So, do you think that digital transformation needs to go through 'the cloud'?

The differential element is that Cloud Computing is helping to democratise technology. Historically, large corporations had the capacity to access these extremely expensive, large, complicated technological solutions, Big Data or supercomputing elements... All these technological products were very expensive and were not within anyone's reach. The beauty of Cloud Computing is that it has democratised this technology.

Right now, anyone at home can use the same technology as a big company. Use it on a small scale and pay only for its use (so you don't have to make those terrible financial investments) and, with that, get a product to market very quickly.

When technology has been democratised, when everybody plays with the same cards, when everybody has the same opportunities; suddenly, there is a lot of competition in the market.

We are in an era of economic Darwinism: if companies do not compete and do not offer better solutions to their customers, their partners, to whomever it may concern, they will disappear.

Cloud Computing is allowing that great competitiveness in the market to be greater and to have better products and services, the end users.

Once the technology is democratised, there is more competition in the market. Large and, of course, small (enterprises) that are already cloud-native leverage on these cloud solutions in order to remain competitive, able to adapt and be relevant in the market.

So it is not digital transformation, Cloud... but rather, it is the Cloud that is pushing digital transformation a lot.

2. What are the best practices of running Cloud Computing in an organisation?
There are a number of best practices, logically, for leveraging cloud solutions in a way that is reliable, efficient and short in time. There are standards in the market that have been defined that I think dictate the basis of how to do it.

There are 6 major perspectives that large companies use:

The first would be to make sure that "technology" and "business" are aligned.

Those professional profiles that have that knowledge of all the technological solutions that Cloud Computing can offer to end users and are capable of orchestrating them to generate the solutions that companies, entities or the corresponding company use in their day-to-day work.

Another very interesting one that has developed with Cloud Computing is DevOps architects, where these two worlds of development and operations are mixed.