Amazon’s moving in on the enterprise datacenter with some compelling developments and a burgeoning product line up.  To really drill down on what this means for Amazon, its market position and the state of the industry, make time for Wikibon’s next Peer Incite, scheduled for Thursday, April 23.  Jason Mendenhall, the executive vice president of cloud for co-location provider Switch, will take part in the conversation to discuss AWS’s position in the enterprise space.

The full topic list includes:

·         Can private clouds be extended safely?

·         Will hybrids truly be an extension of internal IT or simply a burst mechanism?

·         Where does AWS fit into the technology portfolio?

·         What alternatives exist and how will they compete?

·         Critical factors IT execs should consider with cloud strategies.

 Amazon, which is expected to rake in $3 billion in public cloud revenue this year, has become a force to be reckoned with in the traditional enterprise market. Organizations are increasingly turning to AWS because it offers more elastic and cost efficient alternative to extending their existing legacy environments.

While Amazon is gaining share, data center vendors are doing their best to keep up with the changes in the marketplace. NetApp recently announced the availability of a private cloud solution in Equinix facilities that have AWS Connect deployed. The platform gives enterprises the option of a hybrid environment that delivers both scalability and full control over mission-critical information.

Security is a top priority for every cloud provider. On Wednesday Jeff Barr unveiled CloudHSM, an EC2 service lets users tuck away their encryption keys and access rights in a dedicated, tamper-resistant module. This appliance can call up keys without exposing the data to the outside world or hindering performance.

Amazon’s respect for users’ privacy came under scrutiny this week when free software activist Richard Stallman blasted the company for spying on Ubuntu users. Stallman’s accusation is based on the fact the latest version of the operating system comes pre-integrated with an Amazon search bar that collects browsing data.