How cloud can help startups prosper, in conversation with Amazon's Gaurav Arora

There was a huge wave of movement to the cloud a few years ago. Although the buzz seems to have settled on the surface, the adoption of cloud has only grown over time. It has become the new normal, with both corporates and startups now deploying their applications on the cloud.

Cloud has the potential for making application development faster and opening up a variety of functionalities for a business. Making changes to an application on the cloud takes only a few minutes, and the changes are reflected globally. In order to understand the new trends in the cloud ecosystem, we spoke to Gaurav Arora, Head-Startup Ecosystem, APAC, Amazon Web Services (AWS)‎, at YourStory TechSparks 2016. According to Gaurav,

"We are witnessing enterprises increasingly embracing the innovative technologies and cloud to stay relevant in the market. Digitisation and adoption of cloud is no longer a good-to-explore strategy. It is about survival. The new mantra is “Disrupt or get Disrupted”, and cloud is a big enabler in lowering the overall cost of innovation by allowing for more experimentation and minimising collateral damage from unsuccessful attempts."

According to Gaurav, adoption of cloud is only going to increase among companies across all industries and sizes. "We believe that in the fullness of time, very few companies will be deploying their own data centres, and even then, they will likely be leveraging cloud for some innovative workloads around analytics, big data, or mobility," Gaurav says.

When asked about the current broad-level trends in the cloud landscape, Gaurav said that Cloud Computing is changing both the tech and business aspects of the current world. On the tech front, data today finds greater usage than ever before. Gaurav says,

"Companies are significantly adopting some of our analytics and Big Data services to improve the overall customer experience. The other interesting trend is that security in the cloud is now being recognised as better than on-premises."

Cloud is gaining greater ground on the business front as well, since both startups and enterprises are trying to nurture a culture of lean innovation. "Our expansive technology platform allows companies of all sizes and kinds to run lean, and frees them to be fast, agile, and global while still being efficient with their IT spend," Gaurav tells us.

Speaking about the likes of Bombay Stock Exchange and Manipal Education, who use AWS to run complex systems on the cloud, Gaurav tells us how cloud has enabled startups to experiment more and at a cheaper cost. Since startups almost always differentiate their core offerings, cloud takes away the load of running their own backend infrastructure. He adds,

"AWS takes away all that undifferentiated heavy lifting from the startups, increasing their odds of success. Startups can “fail forward, fail faster, fail cheaper” and eventually succeed. As Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup book, called out, “Cloud is like a fertiliser that creates startups.”