Equity Research 1 - 2022

A Business Value White Paper, sponsored by Amazon
The Business Value of

Amazon Web Services:
North America
RESEARCH BY:
Lara Greden Matthew Marden

Research Director, Platform as a Service Research Vice President,
(PaaS), IDC Business Value Strategy Practice, IDC
The Business Value of Amazon Web Services: North America
Navigating this White Paper

Click on titles or page numbers to navigate to each section.
Business Value Highlights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Executive Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Situation Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Business Challenges. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Key Cloud Revenue Growth Trends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Amazon Web Services. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
The Business Value of Amazon Web Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Study Demographics and Methodology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Choice of Amazon Web Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Use of Amazon Web Services by Interviewed Organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Business Value and Quantified Benefits of Amazon Web Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Lower Cost of Operations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11
Optimizing Spending on IT Infrastructure Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11
Enabling IT Teams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Improving the Capabilities of Development Teams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Minimizing Operational Risk and Related Costs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Realizing Better Business Results. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
ROI Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Challenges/Opportunities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Appendix A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Appendix B. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Additional Quotes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
About the Analysts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

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2
BUSINESS VALUE HIGHLIGHTS
Click on highlights below to navigate to related content within this PDF.
512% 22% 79%

five-year ROI lower cost of faster deployment of new
infrastructure compute/storage resources
10 months
to payback 63% 2.4x
more efficient IT new applications and features
56% infrastructure teams delivered per year
lower five-year cost
of operations 84% $96.0
fewer unplanned outages million higher revenue enabled
per year per organization
Executive Summary
IDC research shows that leaders across IT and the business increasingly view cloud providers as
strategic technology partners in today’s digital-first world. They are choosing cloud providers for
faster access to technologies spanning compute services, data services, application framework
services, and usage multiplier services including governance and security. Yet, increasingly,
cloud selection processes are going beyond technology considerations to look more deeply at
the business value benefits.
IDC expects that by 2023, 40% of the G2000 will reset cloud selection processes to focus
on business outcomes rather than IT requirements. Organizational leaders are increasingly
expecting cloud providers to partner with them as they migrate on-premises estates to the
cloud and make the transition to cloud-native development and governance, including both
cost governance and IT governance. CIOs and CTOs will require cloud providers to help them
achieve business case goals directly related to corporate strategy. Business value studies are an
important part of that objective.
IDC interviewed 14 North American organizations about their experiences using Amazon Web
Services (AWS) to run many of their most business-critical applications and services. These North
America–based customers spoke to the strong value they are achieving with AWS compared
with their legacy on-premises environments. Specifically, they reported establishing a more
cost-effective, efficient, agile, and high-performing infrastructure foundation for their business
operations with AWS.

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Table of Contents 3
Based on these interviews, IDC calculates that interviewed organizations will realize a
512% five-year ROI by:
Optimizing spending on compute, storage, and other IT resources
Empowering IT teams to work more efficiently and focus on innovative and business-driven
activities
Increasing the value of development teams by providing them with agile and frictionless
access to testing and development resources and enhancing their ability to deploy and update
new applications and features
Decreasing risk-related costs by reducing the impact on business operations of unplanned

outages and security vulnerabilities
Capturing more revenue and improving business results by establishing and maintaining
competitive differentiation in the quality of their products and services, accelerating revenue
cycles by speeding up development times, and leveraging new technologies to drive
business outcomes
Situation Overview
Using lessons learned from ecommerce where fluctuating demand for computing resources
is a given, Amazon kicked off the Amazon Web Services initiative in 2006. Service-oriented
architecture (SOA) gained popularity in the mid-1990s to reduce the complexity of software
by breaking them up into components delivered as services and connected through common
standards. The SOA experience that predated the AWS launch gave Amazon an advantage
in building a distributed services architecture offering that fits very well with end-user needs.
Using customer feedback, the services offered by AWS have expanded from the initial portfolio
that delivered base infrastructure services to higher-end services that are all based on a highly
available infrastructure delivered in an abstracted and automated fashion. AWS also provides
customers with multiple migration tools to assist them to move compute and database workloads
to the public cloud. The success of Amazon is demonstrated by Amazon moving from number 29
on the Fortune 500 list in 2015 to number 2 in 2021.
Business Challenges
Lower-cost, cloud-delivered services combined with agility from open source and cloud-native
application development tools are leading to lower infrastructure and labor costs for organizations
along with faster ability to serve customer needs. As a result, businesses that fail to take
advantage of technological innovation often struggle to maintain their competitive advantage
because technology innovation and competitiveness are tightly linked.
To surpass competition, today’s CEO, CIO, and CTO have to handle the complex task of digitally
transforming the entire organization while leveraging technology that is changing at a much faster
pace than any time before. The related transition to cloud-native development and governance,
including both cost governance and IT governance, impacts both legacy applications and
net-new application development. This is resulting in impacts at all levels of business and IT
strategy, and cloud providers and the wider cloud partner ecosystem are stepping up to serve
strategic partnership roles with their customers.

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Table of Contents 4
Key Cloud Revenue Growth Trends

To provide context about cloud growth, Figure 1 (next page) shows the worldwide cloud vendor
revenue forecast in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) from 2020 to
2025. Together, IaaS and PaaS are projected to grow at a healthy compound annual growth rate
(CAGR) of 29% from 2020 to 2025, from just over $100 billion in 2020 to reach $400 billion in 2025.
The continued growth in revenue in the cloud market illustrates the significant appetite organizations
have for cloud adoption. It speaks to the value that organizations place on agility gained by
developing and deploying applications via cloud services.
AWS held 46.3% of the IaaS market in 2020, growing at 32% year over year, and held 15% of the PaaS
market, growing at 30% year over year. These market shares and growth rates indicate the success
customers are finding with AWS.
FIGURE 1
Worldwide Whole Cloud Revenue by Consumption Model, 2020–2025
($B per year)
$175B
$185B
$147B
$116B
$229B
$89B $136B
$67B $106B
$82B
$48B $63B
2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025

IaaS Paas
Note: For more details, see Worldwide Whole Cloud Forecast, 2021-2025: The Path Ahead for Cloud in a Digital-First World (IDC #US47397521, September
2021), Worldwide Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service Market Shares, 2020: Data Growth, Edge Use Cases, and Hybrid Deployment Take Center Stage
(IDC #US47350821, July 2021), and Worldwide Competitive Public Cloud Platform as a Service Market Shares, 2020: The Demand for Application Development
Leveraging PaaS Continues Strong Across Vendors as DX Accelerates (IDC #US48033221, July 2021).

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Table of Contents 5
Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services started as a result of responding to Amazon’s large-scale ecommerce
operations’ need for a highly scalable infrastructure. In the early days, primarily a set of low-level
services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service
(Amazon S3) was abstracting the infrastructure for users. The delivery of cloud-delivered services
led to rapid adoption by start-ups that found the platform to be flexible, agile, extensible, and
available at a low cost. Responding to continuously evolving customer needs, over a period of time,
Amazon built a wide array of higher-level services, leading to increased adoption by enterprises
that found value in modernization and the benefits of decreased costs, increased productivity, and
improved resilience and agility. Figure 2 (next page) shows AWS’s portfolio of services.
FIGURE 2
Overview of AWS Services
ANALYTICS DATABASE HYBRID ARCHITECTURE
• Analytics • Streaming • Relationship Database • Purpose-Built DataBase • AWS Services On-Premises • Integrated Networking
• Data Exchange • ETL • High-Performance Relational • Document DataBase • Data Integration • Integrated Resource &
• Data Lake • Hadoop/Spark Database • Graph DataBases • Integrated Devices & Edge Deployment Management
• Data Pipelines ANALYTICS
• Interactive SQL Queries • Built for the Cloud • In-Memory Caching DATABASE
Systems • VMWare Cloud on AWS
• Data Warehouse • Visualizations • Managed MARIADB • Key-Value Store DataBase • Integrated Identity & Access • Integrated 5G
ANALYTICS STREAMING RELATIONSHIP DATABASES PURPOSE - BUILT DATABASES
• Elasticsearch • Managed MySQL • Ledger DataBase
DATA EXCHANGE ETL HIGH - PERFORMANCE RELATIONAL DOCUMENT DATABASE
• Managed Oracle • Time Series DataBase DATABASE
BUSINESS APPLICATIONS DATA LAKE HADOOP / SPARK
• Managed PostGRESQL B U I L T F OINTERNET
• R T H E C L O U D OF THINGS
GRAPH
(IOT) DATABASE
DATA PIPELINES INTERACTIVE SQL QUERIES IN - MEMORY CACHING
• Contact Center • Unified Communications • Managed SQL Server MANAGED MARIADB
DATA WAREHOUSE VISUALIZATIONS • Rules Engine • Local
K E Y - VData
A L U ECollection
STORE DATABASE
MANAGED MYSQL
• Sharing & Collaboration • Mobile & Web
E L A Apps
STICSEARCH • Device Analytics • Management
L E D G E R D A T A&B ASecurity
SE
• Online Meetings & Chat Without Programming • DEVELOPMENT TOOLS MANAGED ORACLE
• Device SDK • Microcontroller
TIME SERIES DATABASE
MANAGED POSTGRESQL
• Voice-Enabled Workplace • Analyze & Debug • DevOps Resource Management • Device Shadows Operating System
BUSINESS APPLICATIONS • Application Life-Cycle • One-Click App Development
MANAGED SQL SERVER
• Event Detection & Response • Visual Applications
BLOCKCHAIN CONTACT CENTER
Management
UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS
• Patching • Local Compute Development
• Blockchain Templates SHARING & COLLABORATION
• Authoring
MOBILE & WEB APPS WITHOUT
• Pipeline Orchestration DEVELOPMENT TOOLS
• Build & Test P R O G R A M M I N G • Resource Templates Triggers
• Ledger Database ONLINE MEETINGS & CHAT
A N A L Y Z EMACHINE
A N D D E B U G LEARNING DEVOPS RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
• Containers
• Managed Blockchain VOICE - ENABLED WORKPLACE
APPLICATION LIFECYCLE ONE - CLICK APP DEVELOPMENT
M A N A G E •MML E N TFrameworks • AI Services
PATCHING
A U T H O R I•NDeep Learning AMIS & • Chatbots
SECURITY, IDENTITY, & COMPLIANCE BLOCKCHAINCOMPUTE G
PIPELINE ORCHESTRATION
B U I L D & TContainers
EST • Entity Extraction
• Access Control • Monitoring & Logging RESOURCE TEMPLATES
• Compute • Run & Manage Web Apps C O N T A I N•EHardware
RS Acceleration • Face Analytics
B L O C K C H A I N T E M P L A T E S M A N A G E D B L O C K C H A I N TRIGGERS
• Assessment & Reporting • Resource Management • Auto Scaling • Serverless Compute
LEDGER DATABASE • ML at the Edge • Face Search
• Configuration Compliance • Threat Detection • Batch Jobs • Virtual Servers
• Data Protection • Web Applications FireWall • Containers
COMPUTE
• Tensorflow, Pyctorch, Mxnet • Forecasting
• Event-Driven Serverless • Sagemaker • Image Labeling
• DDOS Protection Identity SECURITY, IDENTITY, Computing AND COMPLIANCE • Container Service • Nature
C O M P U T E• Automatic Model Tunning R U N & Language
M A N A G E Processing
Management • Instance Types • Managed Kubernetes • Personalization
WEB APPS
A C C E S S C O N T R O L M O N I T O R I N G & L O G G I N G A U T O S C•AData L I N G Labeling
• Key Management & Storage • Managed Virtual • Storage & Retrieve &S ERecommendation
RVERLESS COMPUTE
A S S E S S M E N T & R E P O R T I N G Private Servers R E S O U R C E M A N A G E M E N T
BATCH JO • BHosted
S NoteBooks
Docker Images E V E N T - D• RML I V EMarketplace
N SERVERLESS V I R T U A L SAnalytics
• Sentiment ERVERS
STORAGE C O N F I G U R A T I O N C O M P L I A•NManaged
CE T H R E
Repository for A T D E T E C T I O N
COMPUTING
• Model Hosting • Speech
C O N T A I Transcription
NERS
• Hybrid D A Storage
Cloud TA PROTECTION Serverless Apps WEB APPLICATION FIREWALL
• Archive Storage INSTANCE TYPES C O N&
• Text T AData
I N E RExtractions
SERVICE
DDOS PROTECTION • Model Optimization
• Backup & Restore • Object Storage
I D E N T I T Y M A N A G E M E N T MEDIA SERVICES
MANAGED VIRTUAL PRIVATE M A Nto A GSpeech
ED KUBERNETES
S E R V E R S • Model Training
• Text
• Block Storage • Windows File System
KEY MANAGEMENT & STORAGE STORE & RETRIEVE DOCKER IMAGES
• Live Video Transport • Video Personalization & M A N A G E •D Pre-Built
R E P O S I T Algorithms
ORY FOR • Translation
• Data Transfer S E R V E R L E• STopic
S A P PModelin
S • Video & Image Analysis
• Media Storage Monetization
• Edge Processing & Computing
STORAGE • Transcoding • Video Processing & Delivery • Deep Learning Models • Content Moderation
• File Storage
• Video Origination • Video Streaming Analyses MEDIA• Reinforcement SERVICESLearning
• High-Performance File System ARCHIVE STORAGE & Packaging H Y B R I D C L O U D S T O R A G E • Spot Instances
BACKUP & RESTORE OBJECT STORAGE L I V E V I D •E O T R A NPredictions
Batch SPORT VIDEO PERSONALIZATION &
M E D I A S T• OReal-Time
RAGE MONETIZATION
BLOCK STORAGE WINDOWS FILE SYSTEM Predictions
VIDEO PROCESSING & DELIVERY
DATA TRANSFER TRANSCODING
VIDEO STREAMING ANALYSIS
Source: AWS, 2022

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Table of Contents 6
The Business Value of Amazon Web

Services
Study Demographics and Methodology
IDC conducted research that explored the value and benefits for organizations using Amazon
Web Services through in-depth interviews with 14 organizations based in North America, all
running enterprise-level workloads on AWS. Questions asked of organization representatives
were both qualitative and quantitative in nature and designed to assist in developing an in-depth,
nontheoretical understanding of the impact of AWS upon IT processes, business operations, and
costs (For additional details on IDC’s Methodology, please see the Appendix).
Table 1 (next page) presents study firmographics for the interviewed AWS customers. Collectively,
interviewed organizations had the profile of a large enterprise with an average of 45,029
employees (median of 18,500), with annual revenue averaging $16.9 billion (median of $5
billion). Though all the companies participating in the study are based in the United States, they
represent a diverse sampling of industry verticals, including biotechnology, financial services,
government, healthcare, insurance, media and entertainment, manufacturing, and transportation.
TABLE 1
Demographics of Interviewed Organizations
Average Median
Number of employees 45,029 18,500
Number of IT staff 5,687 1,500
Number of business applications 480 200
Annual revenue/budget $16.9B $5.0B
Countries United States (14)
Financial services (4), transportation (2), biotechnology (2),

Industries manufacturing, government, healthcare, insurance, media and
entertainment, and medical device manufacturing
n = 14; Source: IDC in-depth interviews, September 2021

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Table of Contents 7
Choice of Amazon Web Services

The North American customers interviewed by IDC described the drivers of their choice of AWS over
refreshing on-premises environments or moving to other cloud solutions. Reliability and scalability
were key differentiators, as were the flexibility and capabilities AWS provide in terms of adopting
and leveraging the benefits of new technologies. The breadth of functionality offered by AWS in
comparison to competing solutions was also a recurring theme among the interviewed organizations.
These differentiators helped motivate the selection of AWS

over competitors’ offerings:
Scalability enabling the matching of capacity to actual demand, IT manager,
financial services:
“We chose AWS for overall infrastructure provisioning capabilities and to be able to scale up
and scale down. Previously, our environment was pretty static, and we always had to build for
peak capacity because there wasn’t enough elasticity.”
Ability to use new technologies to drive business, director, IT operations and logistics,
transportation:
“Cost was secondary to an innovation standpoint with machine learning and artificial intelligence
(AI) in our choice of AWS — in particular, we considered some of the competitive things we
wanted to be able to do in the marketplace.”
Higher functionality for price than public cloud competitor, IT manager, financial services:
“Most of our applications were on premises before AWS. We looked at [another major cloud
vendor], but we felt that we got better bang for our buck with AWS and more functionality that
[the competitor] couldn’t offer at that time. For pricing, it was similar, but we just thought AWS
was better.”
Use of Amazon Web Services by Interviewed

Organizations
Organizations participating in the study reported metrics that indicate a substantial degree of
reliance upon AWS service offerings for their overall business activities. Table 2 (next page)
details the averages and medians for a range of those metrics quantifying their use of AWS.
A key indicator of the extent of study participants’ use of AWS is their spend levels, with average
annual spend of more than $6.6 million and median of more than $2.1 million.
The reported metrics also spotlight the benefit of AWS scalability in terms of increasing and
decreasing capacity as the organizations reported an average number of 924 EC2 instances
(median 288) with a maximum of 1,281 (median 400). The range between average and maximum
EC2 instances demonstrates the degree to which they are leveraging the scalability afforded by
AWS to scale up or down to efficiently accommodate fluctuating business needs. On average,
study participants reported running just under half of their applications in the public cloud (49%),
with more than three-quarters (76%) of those applications running on AWS. Meanwhile, the fact
that interviewed organizations linked their AWS environments to more than three-fifths (63%) of
business revenue on average reflects the extent to which their use of AWS influences and drives
business results.

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Table of Contents 8
TABLE 2
AWS Use by Interviewed Organizations
Average Median
Annual spend on AWS $6.6M $2.1M
Business applications running

49% 45%
in the public cloud
Applications in public cloud

76% 90%
running on AWS
Average number of
924 288
AWS EC2 instances
Maximum number of
1,281 400
AWS EC2 instances
Number of databases 178 125
Number of terabytes of storage 6,589 100
Number of applications 116 50
Number of users of applications 18,841 2,500
Revenue supported 63% 75%
n = 14; Source: IDC interviews, September 2021
Business Value and Quantified Benefits

of Amazon Web Services
North American organizations interviewed for this study reported leveraging various Amazon
Web Services solutions to make their IT operations more cost effective and efficient while taking
advantage of new technologies, enhanced scalability, and flexibility to establish and maintain
business differentiation.
Study participants provided numerous examples that linked their ability to run
IT environments more efficiently and cost effectively while still enabling their
businesses, including:
Scalability and costs that align with performance and use, IT manager, medical device
manufacturing:
“With AWS, we have improved performance, reliability, and enhanced flexibility. For example,
during COVID-19, we were able to scale the system and server utilization and pay less.”

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Table of Contents 9
Move to opex IT model and improved rationalization of IT-related spending, global

director, BI, healthcare:
“One big benefit of moving to AWS was turning our cost model from a capex- to opex-heavy
model … This is a big benefit because it helps our business rationalize the costs of existing
applications as well as for developing new applications.”
Nimble infrastructure that improves time to market, enterprise cloud and security
manager, government:
“The big thing with AWS is just the nimble nature. We used to have to buy storage and servers,
but we can scale now more easily, and that helps with our time to market.”
IDC’s interviews with North American AWS customers estimate that they will achieve
benefits worth an annual average of $52,800 per AWS EC2 virtual instance
($48.8 million per organization) in the areas described in Figure 3 (next page):
IT staff productivity gains:
Study participants reported enhancing the capabilities and value of IT teams such as
infrastructure, help desk, security, and development teams. For purposes of this analysis, IDC
classified development team productivity gains as IT staff-related benefits, although improved
development throughput and timeliness also clearly supports better business results.
IDC calculates that interviewed AWS customers will realize staff efficiencies worth an annual
average of $28,400 per AWS EC2 virtual instance ($26.2 million per organization).
Business productivity benefits:

Study participants achieve better business results through competitive differentiation with
AWS with improved product and service capabilities. IDC puts the value of higher net revenue
and productivity at an average of $14,600 per AWS EC2 virtual instance per year ($13.5 million
per organization).
Risk mitigation benefits:

Study participants minimize operational risk, which reduces costs related to unplanned
outages and security issues. IDC values higher net revenue and productivity achieved
by reducing risk as worth $8,100 per AWS EC2 virtual instance per year ($7.5 million
per organization).
IT infrastructure cost reductions:

Study participants optimize the costs of providing IT resources to their businesses with AWS.
IDC estimates that they will save an annual average of $1,800 per AWS EC2 virtual instance
($1.6 million per organization).

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Table of Contents 10
FIGURE 3
Average Annual Benefits per EC2 Virtual Instance
($ per EC2 virtual instance)
$1,800
Average annual benefits:

$8,100
$52,800 per AWS EC2 virtual instance
IT staff productivity benefits
$28,400 Business productivity benefits

$14,600
Risk mitigation: user productivity benefits
IT infrastructure cost reductions
Lower Cost of Operations

While organizations increasingly expect IT organizations to drive business growth, they
nonetheless still commonly seek to optimize IT costs. This means making cost-effective use of IT
resources such as compute, storage, and network capacity and maximizing the value of skilled
IT teams responsible for providing IT services. Interviewed North American customers reported
capturing significant cost and staff efficiencies with AWS compared with on-premises environments.
IDC estimates that they will save an average of 56% with AWS across these two categories over
five years (refer to Figure 6 on page 16).
Optimizing Spending on IT Infrastructure Resources

Interviewed organizations reported striking differences in the cost of delivering IT infrastructure
capacity to support business operations with AWS versus on-premises environments. The ability
to better match capacity to actual use with AWS was a common theme. Further, the ability to adopt
and leverage new technologies such as containerization and microservices that maximize the utility
of compute and other IT resources was also cited by multiple organizations. A number of study
participants also noted better visibility into usage along with licensing efficiencies.
One interviewee explained that, at an initial review, a cost comparison between on premises and
AWS might initially appear to favor on premises, but that in reality, the reduction in overprovisioning
requirements and related agility and performance benefits offered by AWS mean that an on-
premises environment would require twice the spend to achieve comparable performance.

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Study participants offered more details on these types of cost-related efficiencies

achieved with AWS:
Significantly changing utilization rate, VP/CIO, financial services:
“With our on-premises environment, we would often utilize 10% or less of our resources because
we needed the space for peak times … Now, with AWS, because we can expand capacity as
needed or on demand, we have pretty close to zero overhead.”
Leveraging containerization capabilities to optimize costs, VP, IT applications and

connectivity, biotechnology:
“We have been leveraging containerization with solutions like EKS or ECS from Amazon,
which reduce the overall footprint of EC2 instances … We can scale nonproduction workloads
appropriately and eliminate them when not used while appropriately scaling production
workloads.”
Cost savings by matching capacity to actual demand, director, IT operations and

logistics, transportation:
“An ‘aha’ moment we have had during COVID-19 is our ability with AWS to really ebb and flow
the cost, whereas with on premises, our investment sits there whether it’s getting utilized or not.”
Figure 4 quantifies the annualized infrastructure-related savings that participating organizations

are achieving with AWS. On average, IDC calculates that they will save somewhat more than
$1.9 million per year by spending 22% less for running equivalent workloads with AWS.
FIGURE 4
Annualized Infrastructure Costs
($ per organization per year)
$8.5M
$6.6M
Before/Without AWS With AWS

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Enabling IT Teams
The organizations participating in the study reported that the IT infrastructure cost savings, as
noted previously, were complemented by significant IT staff efficiency gains. The features,
functionality, and direct support provided by AWS enabled IT teams to spend less time on routine
day-to-day management and support tasks. Study participants translated these efficiencies into
increased focus on IT innovation, business-enabling projects, or supporting IT and business
activities more efficiently.
Interviewed North American AWS customers provided examples of this shift:

Shift focus to adding value rather than maintaining and operations, director,
IT operations and logistics, transportation:
“With AWS, our IT teams can now focus on areas where we can add value, compared with
before, when we were spending all our time just spinning things up and maintaining things.”
Create space for professional development, global director, BI, healthcare:

“Before AWS, we had a larger IT infrastructure team of 40–50 people. Now, with AWS, we
have transitioned some of those people into cloud operations and application and database
responsibilities.”
Figure 5 illustrates how the use of AWS has affected how IT infrastructure and administrative
teams spend their time on a day-to-day basis. In short, AWS has enabled them to move from
spending a clear majority of their time on routine maintenance and operational tasks (65%) to
focusing the majority of their time on innovation-related activities (61%). This shift with AWS means
that these teams are spending an average of 39% less time on routine chores — “keeping the
lights on” — and much more time (73%+) on performing value-generating innovative work.
FIGURE 5
Impact on IT Infrastructure and Administrative Team Activities
Time (%)
35% 61%
73% more time for
innovative activities
65%
39% less time,

keeping the lights on 39%
Keeping the lights on Innovation

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The positive impact on the day-to-day efficiency enabled by AWS, as detailed previously,
yielded organizational benefits that are quantified in Table 3. Most significantly, study
participants can manage and run equivalent workloads with substantially less staff resources on
the whole — on average 63% less staff time is required for equivalent workloads. When viewed
from the perspective of staff time spent on day-to-day activities, the efficiency with AWS is even
more significant — average time savings of 78% for study participants.
They linked these efficiencies to automation in updates and patches and much
improved performance that requires less support and intervention:
Automated patching and updates deliver significant IT team efficiencies, CIO, media and
entertainment:
“With AWS, our infrastructure capacity can grow with the same staff. Over the past three
years, we would have needed about eight more people without AWS … The efficiencies
have been in patching and updates and have been enormous.”
Efficiencies improve help desk and IT infrastructure teams’ ability to focus on more
valuable activities, director, IT operations and logistics, transportation:
“With AWS, the infrastructure team doesn’t get bogged down and help desk doesn’t get
called on interruptions … The infrastructure and DevOps teams get freed up because of
fewer interruptions and less time searching to find things across different storage stacks.”
TABLE 3
Impact on IT Infrastructure and Administration Teams
Before/
With AWS Difference Benefit
Without AWS
Equivalent FTEs required for

202.4 74.0 128.4 63%
same workloads
Staff hours per AWS EC2 virtual

412.0 151.0 261.0 63%
instance per year
Value of equivalent FTE time required

$20.2M $7.4M $12.8M 63%
Equivalent FTEs required for

130.4 29.1 101.3 78%
"keeping the lights on"
Value of equivalent FTE time required

for "keeping the lights on" $13.0M $2.9M $10.1M 78%

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IT infrastructure cost savings and IT team efficiencies achieved with AWS combine to enable study
participants to run equivalent workloads at a much lower total cost than with an on-premises
environment. As shown in Figure 6, IDC calculates that they will incur costs that are an average of
56% lower over five years, a savings of over $56,000 per EC2 virtual instance over five years.
FIGURE 6
Five-Year Cost of Operations per EC2 Virtual Instance

($ per EC2 virtual instance)
$102,000
$61,900
56% lower
$45,100
$13,800
$40,100
$31,300

Cost of AWS/ other infrastructure Cost of IT infrastructure staff time
Improving the Capabilities of Development Teams

Study participants have leveraged the use of AWS to distinctly boost their IT agility, scalability,
and flexibility. In measurable terms, this means that they can deliver compute/storage resources
to their business and development operations with greater speed. Faster and more agile
delivery of resources has fostered, expanded, and enhanced development capabilities and
makes it more likely that their services, applications, and features meet the needs of their
customers and employees.
Interviewed organizations provided examples of how access to functionality such

as self-service capabilities on AWS and the ability to extend and contract their AWS
environments in near real time have made their IT operations more agile:
Move to self-service access to IT capacity, VP, IT applications and connectivity,
biotechnology:
“When we had a request for new resources for a project with our on-premises environment,
in the best case we were talking about six weeks, but most often around three months.
Now, with AWS, that’s self-service.”

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No longer slowed by capacity limitations, CIO, media and entertainment:

“Before moving to AWS, we were hosting virtual machine farms and we were constantly
running out of space, hitting 100% faster than we could put resources up.”
Figure 7 depicts the agility benefits that AWS enables. Average time required to deploy
compute/storage resources has dropped from an average of 34.1 hours to just 7.1 hours, a 79%
improvement. Correspondingly, staff time required to deploy the same resources has gone down
from 30.4 hours to 7.5 hours on average per deployment, a 75% improvement, which dramatically
enhances operational agility and translates into faster delivery cadences.
FIGURE 7
Impact on IT Agility
(Number of hours per deployment)
34.1
30.4
7.1 7.5
Total time per deployment Staff time per deployment

Enhancements in agility directly translate to faster delivery cadences for new

software for study participants, including more frequent upgrades to functionality
and features. Study participants spoke in more detail to development-related
benefits with AWS:
Much faster to deliver modernized applications to business, VP/CIO, financial services:
“When we’ve modernized applications with AWS, we’ve done so a lot faster by building them
as AWS cloud-native applications. A good example is that we’re typically getting a 1.0 product
out on AWS within three months, and this typically would have taken at least six to nine
months on premises.”
Automation and moving to infrastructure as code, director, IT operations and logistics,

transportation:
“With AWS, we can build our entire infrastructure as code. We can hand a developer the script
and say, ‘Here’s our standard QA script. Take this and build it in your sandbox. When you’re
done, here’s the kill switch just to kill it all off.”
Table 4 (next page), provides metrics that quantify the AWS-enabled improvements in the
organizations’ development processes. The average number of new applications and number
of new features released per year both more than doubled (127% and 143% higher, respectively)
with AWS. Correspondingly, the development life-cycle times for new applications and features
were shortened by 49% and 40%, respectively.

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TABLE 4
Impact on Development KPIs
Before/
Without AWS
New applications
Number of new applications per year 19.1 43.3 24.2 127%
Development life cycle in weeks

21.3 10.8 10.5 49%
— new applications
New features
Number of new features per year 96.9 235.8 138.9 143%
Development life cycle in weeks

6.0 3.6 2.4 40%
— new features
Table 5 provides additional insights into development-related benefits enabled by AWS. Study
participants reported more than doubling the number of releases (138%) and having the ability
to carry out changes and updates to software products much more expeditiously, requiring an
average of 48% less time on average. They increase the cadence of their release cycles with
AWS even as they improve the quality of releases, as measured by incurring 28% fewer release
errors and handling errors 41% faster on average. These metrics represent a potent combination
of speed, quality, and efficiency when it comes to supporting their business activities with new
software functionality.
TABLE 5
Impact on Release KPIs
Before/
Without AWS
Number of releases per year 516.0 1,225.0 709.0 138%
Releases with errors/defects 16% 11% 4% 28%
Staff time in hours to address

22.6 13.2 9.4 41%
per error/defect
Time required in days to make

7.0 3.6 3.3 48%
changes/updates to applications

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Tables 4 and 5 show how study participants have leveraged AWS to provide customers and
employees with applications of higher overall quality and timeliness, key to optimizing their
business operations. For interviewed organizations, this means that their development teams
are more effective and productive and ultimately more valuable. As shown in Figure 8, study
participants reported higher average development productivity gains of 40%, reflecting the
increased organizational value. A global director, BI, at an interviewed healthcare customer spoke
to the value of their development team using AWS: “We’re benefiting from the speed and velocity
of AWS and getting our products to market faster. Our ability to do that goes up significantly as
we give developers more of a free rein and allow them to control what they can do and how
quickly they can initiate a test instance.” The use of AWS means that development teams that
average 381 developers working on AWS platforms now have the equivalent productivity of 533
developers, a marked and differentiating value for study participants (see Figure 8).
FIGURE 8
Development Team Productivity Gains
(Equivalent productivity — FTEs per organization)
152 533
381
Development team Higher productivity Development team

productivity, through use of AWS productivity, with AWS
before/without AWS
Minimizing Operational Risk and Related Costs

Organizations participating in the study are benefiting from enhanced application quality,
performance, and delivery cycles with AWS, as reported previously, and just as importantly, they
are also realizing substantial improvements in reliability and uninterrupted access to applications
and services with AWS. A number of interviewed organizations reported experiencing
significant ongoing challenges with their on-premises environments as aging infrastructures and
management inefficiencies resulted in too frequent business-impacting outages.

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Study participants described how their use of AWS has resulted in improved
reliability and lower operational risk for their mission-critical applications:
Improved permissions and fewer security breaches, CIO, media and entertainment:
“We have 95% fewer security events with AWS. It’s a hard question to answer because basically
it is not so much breaches, but we had a lot of unwanted access to resources or servers that
had largely disappeared with AWS. Permissions has improved greatly.”
Improved reliability and better access to important business-generating tool, IT director,

manufacturing:
“We have better reliability for our website with AWS, and more importantly, the custom pricing
tool is more available to our internal people. We can be more responsive, which results in better
customer satisfaction.”
As depicted in Table 6, study participants have most importantly reduced the frequency of
unplanned outages by an average of 84% with AWS while requiring 61% less time on average
to resolve such outages. This means that the outages that do occur exert a far lower cost on
employee productivity and business activities: IDC calculates that they have reduced lost
productive time by an average of 83% and lost revenue by an average of 82%. Not only do these
figures represent significant financial value for study participants, almost $6 million per year of
increased productivity and $17 million per year in revenue losses avoided, but they mean that study
participants provide a much-improved customer experience and face far lower operational risk.
TABLE 6
Impact on Unplanned Downtime KPIs
Before/
Without AWS
Number of unplanned outages per year 56.4 9.2 47.3 84%
Mean time to repair (hours) 4.0 1.5 2.5 61%
Hours of productive time lost

10.0 1.7 8.3 83%
per user per year
Productivity loss per year in FTEs

100.5 17.2 83.3 83%
per organization
Value of lost productivity time

$7.0M $1.2M $5.8M 83%
per organization per year
Value of lost revenue per year

$20.7M $3.8M $17.0M 82%
per organization

March 2022 | Doc. #US48888422
Realizing Better Business Results

Many of the benefits reported by the interviewed organizations illustrate AWS-enabled
business gains through upgraded performance, enhanced agility and scalability, and an
improved experience for both internal users and customers. Looking at a consolidated view
of impacts demonstrates the improvement in bottom lines for study participants, as they win
new customers more effectively and retain existing customers by serving them better and
establishing competitive differentiation through functionality, timeliness, and quality of their
products and services with AWS.
The AWS-enabled ability to more easily adopt and incorporate new technologies into business
models and processes contributed to the reported increases in revenue. In today’s world, the
ability to leverage the benefits of new technologies by seamlessly and rapidly integrating
them into business processes, both internal and customer facing, is key to organizations’
ability to effectively compete for market share. Further, while IDC classified development team
productivity gains as IT staff benefits for this study, enhanced development capabilities often
lead directly to improved ability to address and win business opportunities.
Organizations reported specific examples of their experiences in using AWS for

more quickly and smoothly incorporating new technologies such as AI, ML, and
data analytics:
Improved performance through GPU access and AI/ML technology use, director of
engineering, financial services:
“With AWS, we can leverage GPUs for machine learning and AI workloads, which is something
we couldn’t do previously. Having GPUs helps with AI and ML processing by making it faster
compared with using CPUs or VMs.”
Added functionality to applications/services through AWS capabilities, VP/CIO,

financial services:
“We benefit from the scaling and faster time to market with AWS, and we can use their
machine learning engine to add machine learning capabilities to our applications.”
Much faster application of data in support of business, global director, BI, healthcare:
“Previously, we could analyze our data and return the results back to our customers in around
60 days. Now with AWS, we can return those results in about four days — a 15x improvement
in turnaround time.”
Organizations shared numerous examples of direct business benefits that they derive from the
use of AWS.
These benefits related directly to improved scalability, flexibility, and performance

that they have achieved with the AWS platform, which changes how they serve
customers:
Much faster delivery of important service/solution to market, IT manager,
medical device manufacturer:
“We launched a COVID-19 testing solution that would normally have taken 18 months, but
through use of AWS and the system, we were able to launch in something like 6 months.”

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Foundation for digitizing services, delivering to meet customer expectations,

VP, IT applications and connectivity, biotechnology:
“A big initiative for us is digitizing our service offering. With AWS, we can now build things like
predictive analytics for our customers to help optimize use of our equipment and instruments.”
Performance and reliability needed for seasonal business demand,

IT director, manufacturing:
“Before AWS, seasonality in demand was a challenge — we need all of our systems to operate
flawlessly and if an outage would basically go all the way to the president and board.
We have been able to eliminate these types of outages with AWS.”
As shown in Table 7, business enablement through AWS has resulted in an average revenue
increase of $96.0 million per year per organization, which equals $103,800 per EC2 virtual
instance. For purposes of IDC’s financial model, a 15% margin assumption was assumed, which
results in net revenue gains worth an average of $14.4 million per organization ($15,600 per
EC2 virtual instance). For study participants operating in competitive and fluid markets, the use
of AWS has proven to be a competitive advantage with a clear business impact.
TABLE 7
Business Productivity Benefits — Higher Revenue
Per Organization Per EC2 Virtual Instance
Revenue impact
Total additional revenue per year $96.0M $103,800
Assumed operating margin 15% 15%
Total additional net revenue per year* $14.4M $15,600
*IDC applies a 15% margin assumption to calculate net revenue gains for purposes of its financial model.
ROI Summary
IDC’s analysis of the financial benefits and costs related to the use of Amazon Web Services by
interviewed North American organizations is presented in Table 8 (next page). IDC calculates
that, on a per-organization basis, interviewed organizations will achieve total discounted five-year
benefits of $170.0 million, or $184,000 per AWS EC2 virtual instance, based on enhanced business
benefits, improved IT staff efficiencies, faster and more efficient software development, reductions
in unplanned downtime, and optimized IT infrastructure-related costs. These benefits compare
with projected total discounted investment costs over five years of $27.8 million per organization
($30,100 per AWS EC2 virtual instance). At these levels of benefits and investment costs, IDC
calculates that organizations will achieve a five-year ROI of 512% and breakeven on their investment
in AWS in 10 months.

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TABLE 8
Five-Year ROI Analysis
Average per Organization Average per EC2 Virtual Instance
Benefit (discounted) $170.0M $184,000
Investment (discounted) $27.8M $30,100
Net present value (NPV) $142.3M $153,900
Return on investment (ROI) 512% 512%
Payback period 10 months 10 months
Discount rate 12% 12%
Challenges/Opportunities
In pursuing digital innovation and making decisions regarding cloud adoption, IDC sees
organizations successfully addressing the following challenges:
Speed of provisioning infrastructure and moving from an IT ticket request type of process to
self-service, thereby empowering development teams to move quickly
Ability to (and speed of) scaling the infrastructure up and down with containerization and
serverless, thereby reducing overhead costs significantly
Team size efficiencies for automated patching and updates, enabling the need for fewer
people even as infrastructure capacity grows
Minimizing costs and staff time related to unplanned outages and security issues, allowing
their time to be more productively engaged
Enabling innovation with machine learning and artificial intelligence to create competitive
differentiation, deliver cost savings, and increase revenue
Empowering developers to delivering new applications and functionality to market rapidly

(e.g., within three months instead of six or in days/weeks instead of months)
Needing flawless operation and getting attention from executives, not because of outages,
but for enabling the business
Successfully addressing these challenges represents direct lines of questioning for cloud
providers as you align technology and architecture decisions with the overarching digital strategy
of your organization.

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Conclusion
Cloud adoption continues at a rapid pace, with IDC forecasting compound annual growth rate
of 29% from 2020 to 2025 in the combined IaaS and PaaS markets. Organizations that adopt
cloud technologies find that lower-cost, cloud-delivered services combined with agility from
open source and cloud-native application development practices lead to competitive advantage
because technology innovation and competitiveness are tightly linked. Today’s CEO, CIO, and CTO
increasingly see portfolios of cloud-delivered services covering analytics, business applications,
blockchain, security/identity/compliance, storage, database, development tools, compute, media
services, hybrid architecture, Internet of Things, and machine learning as critical for delivering their
own differentiated services to customers.
IDC’s research demonstrates the strong value for North American organizations of running many
of their most important business applications and customer-facing services on AWS. Interviewed
AWS customers reported that they have not only made their IT operations more cost effective and
efficient but also leveraged new technologies, enhanced scalability, and strong performance to
establish and maintain differentiation in highly competitive markets. As a result, they can better
serve existing customers and address new business opportunities in a timely and robust manner,
which leads to substantial business gains in the form of higher revenue and reduced operational
risk. Overall, IDC calculates that interviewed AWS customers from North America will achieve more
than a 6:1 ratio of benefits to investment costs over five years, which would result in a ROI of 512%,
with breakeven on their investment occurring in an average of 10 months.
Appendix A:
Methodology
IDC’s standard Business Value/ROI methodology was utilized for this project. This methodology is
based on gathering data from organizations currently using Amazon Web Services solutions as the
foundation for the model.
Based on interviews with organizations using AWS, IDC performed a three-step

process to calculate the ROI and payback period:
1. Gathered quantitative benefit information during the interviews using a before-and-after
assessment of the impact of using Amazon Web Services. In this study, the benefits included
IT infrastructure cost savings, IT staff and development team efficiencies and productivity gains,
reduced costs associated with risk, and higher revenue.
2. Created a complete investment (five-year total cost analysis) profile based on the interviews.
Investments go beyond the initial and annual costs of using Amazon Web Services and can
include additional costs related to migrations, planning, consulting, and staff or user training.
3. Calculated the ROI and payback period. IDC conducted a depreciated cash flow analysis of
the benefits and investments for the organizations’ use of Amazon Web Services over a five-year
period. ROI is the ratio of the net present value (NPV) and the discounted investment.
The payback period is the point at which cumulative benefits equal the initial investment.

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IDC bases the payback period and ROI calculations on a number of assumptions,
which are summarized as follows:
Time values are multiplied by burdened salary (salary + 28% for benefits and overhead) to
quantify efficiency and manager productivity savings. For purposes of this analysis, based on
the geographic locations of the interviewed organizations, IDC has used assumptions of an
average fully loaded salary of $100,000 per year for IT staff members and an average fully
loaded salary of $70,000 per year for non-IT staff members. IDC assumes that employees
work 1,880 hours per year (47 weeks x 40 hours).
The net present value of the five-year savings is calculated by subtracting the amount that
would have been realized by investing the original sum in an instrument yielding a 12% return
to allow for the missed opportunity cost. This accounts for both the assumed cost of money
and the assumed rate of return.
Because IT solutions require a deployment period, the full benefits of the solution are not
available during deployment. To capture this reality, IDC prorates the benefits on a monthly
basis and then subtracts the deployment time from the first-year savings.
Note: All numbers in this document may be inexact due to rounding.
Appendix B
Additional Quotes
Selected additional quotes from interviews with North American organizations using
AWS are:
Elastic capacity and strong security capabilities, CIO, media and entertainment:
“We chose AWS to have the elastic capability to grow and shrink resources as needed and
to be able to manage that. The other reason is the cost. It is very cost effective for us to use
Amazon S3 and Glacier and a lot more reliable. We have access to a lot of tools for managing
the environment, especially for security, identification, access control, and security auditing.
As a result, if we configure it properly, then we have a very secure environment.”
Focusing on scalability and serverless architecture, VP, hospitality:

“Scalability was key for us in making the decision to use AWS, and we were moving toward
more of a serverless architecture too; in terms of how our services were set up, we definitely
wanted an AWS framework to help us out. Serverless is important because it allows better
performance of our applications, overall.”
Automation that delivers infrastructure efficiencies, VP, IT applications

and connectivity, biotechnology:
“The benefits of AWS come down to staffing and our ability to automate infrastructure. As
we’ve grown our infrastructure footprint, we haven’t had to grow resourcing at the pace of the
infrastructure growth because we’ve been able to access tooling with AWS necessary to do
that in an automated fashion.”

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Application performance and reduced risk for distributed locations, director,

IT operations and logistics, transportation:
“As we grow the business more globally, we already have a significant footprint on the other
side of the world, but we can make the applications faster with AWS just by leveraging some
replication things we never were able to do before. Resiliency is a huge thing for us, not
worrying about failover cluster testing or DR testing.”
Scalability and costs that align with performance and use, IT manager,
medical device manufacturing:
“With AWS, we have basically improved performance, reliability, and enhanced flexibility. For
example, initially, during COVID-19, we were able to scale the system and server utilization
and pay less. So we have pay for performance with AWS and we can scale up and down.”
Bending the cost curve for running, storing, and using data, IT director, manufacturing:
“Over the last few years, our digital transformation has been enormous. We could see that the
spend, especially with data warehousing and other areas with gargantuan amounts of data,
was moving upward just to keep up with the pace every year. That definitely has become
more manageable at this point with AWS.”
Cost savings by matching actual demand, director, IT operations and logistics,

transportation:
“Some of the aha moments we have had during COVID-19 with AWS is our ability to really ebb
and flow the cost, whereas with on premises, once you make that investment that investment
sits there whether it’s getting utilized or not … With AWS, we’ve saved anywhere from 10% to
20% total cost compared with an on-premises environment.”
Achieving same performance/scalability that would be much more expensive,

director of engineering, financial services:
“It can appear to be more expensive with AWS, but we wouldn’t be able to get the agility and
performance we need with our previous on-premises environment. It was not enough, and it
would not scale just the way that we wanted it to. If we were to do this on premises, I think we
would need to spend twice as much as we spend on AWS.”
AWS functionality that enables administrator efficiencies, VP, hospitality:

“AWS has made our job easier, operationally, and we’re more efficient in terms of how we
deploy updates, which is reflected in the move from five people down to three people … AWS
provides really strong reporting, good utilization tracking, and good load balancing, which
gives us flexibility in terms of administrative capabilities.”
Improved performance through GPU access and AI/ML technology use,

director of engineering, financial services:
“With AWS, we have auto updates to the infrastructure and then we can leverage GPUs for
machine learning and AI, which is something we couldn’t do previously. Having GPUs helps
with the AI and ML processing, so instead of using CPUs or VMs, we can leverage GPU and
make our processing faster.”
Much faster to address release bugs, director, IT operations and logistics, transportation:
“We deploy releases once a week across different applications. If we do introduce bugs during
those releases, our average time to resolve that bug before was 72 hours, now the average
time to deploy and change and fix that bug is 4 hours.”

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About the Analysts
Lara Greden
Research Director, Platform as a Service (PaaS), IDC
Dr. Lara Greden is Research Director for IDC’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) practice.
Greden’s research focuses on platforms for application development on private, public, and
hybrid clouds and on edge deployments. She directs research into the competitive markets
of cloud platforms and application development and deployment services that are enabling
digital transformation, including integration, containers, serverless computing, big data, AI, ML,
predictive analytics, IoT, and other emerging technologies.
More about Lara Greden
Matthew Marden
Research Vice President, Business Value Strategy Practice, IDC
Matthew is responsible for carrying out custom business value research engagements and
consulting projects for clients in a number of technology areas with a focus on determining the
return on investment (ROI) of their use of enterprise technologies. Matthew’s research often
analyzes how organizations are leveraging investment in digital technology solutions and
initiatives to create value through efficiencies and business enablement.
More about Matthew Marden

March 2022 | Doc. #US48888422
This publication was produced by IDC Custom Solutions. As a premier global provider of market
intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications,
and consumer technology markets, IDC’s Custom Solutions group helps clients plan, market, sell,
and succeed in the global marketplace. We create actionable market intelligence and influential
content marketing programs that yield measurable results.
@idc @idc idc.com
© 2022 IDC Research, Inc. IDC materials are licensed for external use, and in no way does the use or publication
of IDC research indicate IDC’s endorsement of the sponsor’s or licensee’s products or strategies.
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A Business Value White Paper, sponsored by Amazon

The Business Value of

Lara Greden Matthew Marden

Navigating this White Paper

Business Value Highlights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

A Business Value White Paper, sponsored by Amazon

BUSINESS VALUE HIGHLIGHTS

Click on highlights below to navigate to related content within this PDF.

512% 22% 79%

A Business Value White Paper, sponsored by Amazon

Decreasing risk-related costs by reducing the impact on business operations of unplanned

A Business Value White Paper, sponsored by Amazon

Key Cloud Revenue Growth Trends

2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025

A Business Value White Paper, sponsored by Amazon

Amazon Web Services

A Business Value White Paper, sponsored by Amazon

The Business Value of Amazon Web

Number of employees 45,029 18,500

Number of IT staff 5,687 1,500

Number of business applications 480 200

Annual revenue/budget $16.9B $5.0B

Countries United States (14)

Financial services (4), transportation (2), biotechnology (2),

n = 14; Source: IDC in-depth interviews, September 2021

A Business Value White Paper, sponsored by Amazon

Choice of Amazon Web Services

These differentiators helped motivate the selection of AWS

Use of Amazon Web Services by Interviewed

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Annual spend on AWS $6.6M $2.1M

Business applications running

Applications in public cloud

Number of databases 178 125

Number of terabytes of storage 6,589 100

Number of applications 116 50

Number of users of applications 18,841 2,500

Revenue supported 63% 75%

n = 14; Source: IDC interviews, September 2021

Business Value and Quantified Benefits

A Business Value White Paper, sponsored by Amazon

Move to opex IT model and improved rationalization of IT-related spending, global

Business productivity benefits:

Risk mitigation benefits:

IT infrastructure cost reductions:

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Average annual benefits:

IT staff productivity benefits

$28,400 Business productivity benefits

IT infrastructure cost reductions

n = 14; Source: IDC in-depth interviews, September 2021

Lower Cost of Operations

Optimizing Spending on IT Infrastructure Resources

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Study participants offered more details on these types of cost-related efficiencies

Leveraging containerization capabilities to optimize costs, VP, IT applications and

Cost savings by matching capacity to actual demand, director, IT operations and

Figure 4 quantifies the annualized infrastructure-related savings that participating organizations

Before/Without AWS With AWS