A growing number of data service providers are moving their operations to Amazon Web Services to eliminate the distractions of buying, standing up and maintaining infrastructure and reallocating their staff to focus on their business. As examples, Wikibon Big Data lead analyst Jeff Kelly cites Philips Healthcare,  which presented a keynote at the recent AWS re:Invent 2014 conference, the Weather Company, and IMS Health  in his latest Wikibon Professional Alert.

Interviewed on theCUBE at the conference Bryson Koehler, EVP, CTO and CIO of the Weather Company, said his company moved to AWS because it needed a platform that could scale as data volumes increase. The Weather Company delivers weather data to a large group of corporate companies including 48 of the top 100 commercial airlines worldwide.

“I didn’t want to run 13 data centers. That’s not the business I want to be in,” Koehler said. Moving to AWS increased his company’s speed and agility and allowed it to use Amazon Redshift to supplement its own analytics capabilities. However the greatest benefit was that “Amazon Web Services allows me to focus in on those innovations around the algorithmic science of understanding these [new] data sets and how they equate to a better forecast” rather than on racking and stacking servers and running cables.

Kabir Shahani, VP of IMS Health, agreed, noting, “A lot of [the benefit of AWS] is being able to focus on the things that matter.” IMS health has moved a 10-plus petabyte proprietary database of healthcare data to AWS. It analyzes that data for insights into prescription trends, drug interactions and drug company marketing campaign effectiveness.

AWS, Kelly concludes, is “proving an ideal platform for data service providers.” He recommends that providers still running on-premise consider migrating to the cloud.

Kelly’s full Professional Alert is available without charge on the Wikibon Web site.  IT professionals are invited to register for membership in the Wikibon community, which allows them to influence the direction of research and post their own questions, comments and original research.

Graphic courtesy The Weather Channel