At tech companies that pledge to listen to customer feedback, the lines were jammed in 2020. COVID-19 rushed a lot of companies to migrate applications to cloud, acquainting them briskly with the complexities of data migration and storage. Many have chimed in with preferences on storage performance, cost, etc.

How has cloud leader Amazon Web Services Inc. answered these frantically pivoting customers?

“If there was ever a year you don’t want to manage a data center, it’s 2020,” said Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec (pictured), vice president of AWS storage at Amazon Web Services Inc.

Tomsen Bukovec spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed how COVID-19 has catalyzed a cloud pivot and how AWS is responding to customers’ demands for storage upgrades. (* Disclosure below.)

AWS aims to make throwing in security an auto response

It can take months to acquire and install a storage area network, and is also quite expensive — never ideal and hardly doable for companies under lockdown. It does, however, offer performance that many do not want to compromise on when they move to cloud.

In August, AWS announced io2 volumes for Elastic Block Store with 99.999% durability. This week, it launched io2 Block Express, with 256k IOPS, 4k megabytes of throughput and 64 terabytes of capacity. This upgrade (also available for S3 block storage) gives customers SAN-level performance in the cloud for the first time, according to Tomsen Bukovec.

With gp3 (general purpose SSD volumes), AWS has added 4x peak throughput on top of gp2 at a 20% lower price per gigabyte per month. Addressing the #1 bit of feedback it received over the year on gp2, it has also separated throughput and IOPS from capacity in gp3 for fine-grained customization for changing data patterns.

Also included in this weeks announcements are S3 Bucket Keys, which drop the cost of using KMS for service site encryption with S3 by over 90% through integrating the two services. This minimizes the cost of frequent requests to large data lakes, according to Tomsen Bukovec.

Since storage is often a company’s introduction to cloud, AWS wants to make accompanying tasks around migration and security as easy to digest (and afford) as possible.

“Our goal is to make security so cost effective, people don’t think about it,” Tomsen Bukovec concluded. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE