Photo taken on June 22, 2016 shows a view of Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong, south China. (QIN QING/XINHUA)

Numerous companies in Hong Kong, such as those in financial services, retail, and small and medium businesses, have been moving their workloads to the cloud, especially in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, which accelerated their digital journey.

Amazon Web Services Managing Director for Hong Kong and Taiwan Robert Wang said: “We’re moving into an era of truly mainstream adoption of cloud.”

Amazon Web Services is marking its 10th anniversary in Hong Kong this year and is among the three biggest cloud services providers in the world, along with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure

He describes the cloud as “the business enabler”.

Wang said the global cloud heavyweight has helped many customers to move their workload via the AWS Migration Acceleration Program and AWS Database Migration Service.

Amazon Web Services is marking its 10th anniversary in Hong Kong this year and is among the three biggest cloud services providers in the world, along with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

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Cathay Pacific Airways, conglomerate New World Development, and Kerry Logistics, are among AWS customers. Startups such as Welend, Bowtie, and Prenetics, were built on AWS from day one, Wang said.

“We supported the digital transformation of tens of thousands of companies from all industries of Hong Kong in the past decade. There are a number of companies that are either running, or in the process of moving, the vast majority, or all of their infrastructure to AWS, either globally or in Hong Kong. Although most enterprises typically build a two-to-four-year migration plan, the amount of enterprise migration to AWS, is substantial,” Wang noted.

He said that long-term customer New World Development, migrated many applications to the AWS Cloud, including its loyalty app for retail holdings, and marketing and customer relationship management workloads.

“Since migration (to the cloud), service availability has improved by up to 50 percent, infrastructure costs have also dropped by 60 percent compared with using the colocation data center,” Wang explained.

He said that in Hong Kong, customers can move to the cloud and run any type of work. These include applications, websites, databases, storage, physical or virtual servers, and even entire data centers from their premises, hosting facility, or other public cloud to AWS.

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This undated file photo shows Robert Wang, Amazon Web Services Managing Director for Hong Kong and Taiwan. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Wang outlined five main reasons that encourage companies to move to the AWS cloud.

“The first is agility. AWS lets customers quickly spin up resources as they need them, deploying hundreds or even thousands of servers in minutes. This means customers can quickly develop and roll out new applications. Teams can experiment and innovate more quickly and frequently. If an experiment fails, you can always de-provision those resources without risk,” he said.

The second reason is cost savings.

“AWS allows customers to trade capital expense for variable expense, and only pay for IT as they use it. And, the variable expense is much lower than what customers can do for themselves because of AWS’s economies of scale. For example, Dow Jones has estimated that migrating its data centers to AWS will contribute to a global savings of $100 million (HK$785 million) in infrastructure costs,” Wang explained.

“The third reason is elasticity. Customers used to over-provision to ensure they had enough capacity to handle business operations at peak level of activity. Now, they can provision the amount of resources that they actually need, knowing they can instantly scale up or down. This also reduces cost and improves a customer’s ability to meet their users’ demands.

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“The fourth reason is that the cloud allows customers to innovate faster because they can focus their highly valuable IT resources on developing applications that differentiate their business and transform customer experiences instead of the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing infrastructure and data centers.”

Wang said the fifth reason is that AWS makes it possible for a company to deploy globally in minutes.

“AWS has the concept of a region, a physical location where we cluster data centers. We call each group of logical data centers an ‘Availability Zone’. AWS has 84 such zones within 26 geographic regions, and has announced plans for 24 more zones and eight more AWS regions in Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and United Arab Emirates. The AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region was launched in 2019.”

Over the past decade, AWS has also been nurturing digital talent, especially in schools and universities, and elevating the competitiveness of Hong Kong.

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“In schools, we have seen a growing number of students and teachers looking for ways to upskill their knowledge of the cloud. Currently, all 11 universities in Hong Kong are working with AWS in training,” Wang said.