Predicting the future of enterprise technology is impossible. But one thing seems a certainty: Hybrid cloud is going to remain an important part of any comprehensive information technology strategy.

As customers demand ever more flexibility and connectivity, operating on-premises, in the cloud and on the edge is essential to maintaining data security, speed and accessibility. Enabling this is the task of Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Outposts.

“People are operating in more places than they ever thought they would have to,” said Joshua Burgin (pictured), general manager of AWS Outposts at AWS. “These are big customers — manufacturing, telco, healthcare, public sector customers, people in gaming. They serve customers around the world. That’s a trend that, regardless of industry, that’s what we’re seeing.”

Burgin spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Amazon EC2 15th Birthday Event. They discussed the global impact of EC2 and the importance of AWS Outposts and Wavelength Zones for edge computing and hybrid strategies. (* Disclosure below.)

In 15 years EC2 goes from 1 to 25 regions

Fifteen years ago, AWS had just three availability zones in one EC2 region: us-east-1, also known as compute-1, located in North Virginia. Now, there are 25 regions and 80 availability zones, with the demand for hybrid pushing AWS to provide more. But when a regional data center just isn’t close enough, AWS Outposts bring the potential of hybrid on-prem, meaning lower latency, faster data processing and data residency compliance for regulation and security purposes.

“With Outposts and with Local Zones, we’re giving people the ability to ensure that their compute and their storage are in whatever country or municipality or city or state that they need them to be,” Burgin stated. “A bank or a healthcare company might need to have that compute and storage literally in a specific facility because of regulations.”

Without the option of Outposts, companies “would be forced to revert to a bare-metal solution and take on all that heavy burden,” Burgin added.

Dish opts for Outposts

The recent partnership between AWS and Dish Network Corp. marks a move into cloud for the reticent telco industry, which Burgin described as “one of the biggest industries with the smallest amount of cloud adoption to date.”

AWS’ ability to provide Dish with the smaller 1U and 2U form factor Outposts, which will be released later this year, was important to provide the ultra-low latency that the company requires to build out a nationwide 5G network. The size of a couple of pizza boxes, the smaller form-factor Outposts will use the network of Local Zones that AWS is building across the U.S. for the most demanding workloads, as well as the more centralized regions for less latency-sensitive workloads, according to Burgin.

“It’s one of the best examples I can think of where people that were held back by the technology … are now enabled to move really quickly,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Amazon EC2 15th Birthday Event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Amazon EC2 15th Birthday Event. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE