Data has become an indispensable part of business operations. As organizations look to expand their data’s quantity and value, they need to simplify how they manage the relevant cloud infrastructure, according to Kevin Miller (pictured), vice president and general manager of S3 at Amazon Web Services Inc.

“Nine or 10 years ago, when we talked about data lakes, we were looking at maybe tens of terabytes,” Miller said. “[Now,] you’re talking about tens or hundreds of petabytes or even more.”

Miller spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Storage Day event. They discussed businesses’ growing data lake needs and how platforms like Amazon S3 simplify operations, cutting costs and driving innovation. (* Disclosure below.)

Innovation through simplification

As data volume and applications rise, so do the related costs. Managing the cloud infrastructure necessary to process so much information can quickly become expensive and take time, so simplifying these environments is a prerequisite for capitalizing on data. That simplification has become one of Amazon S3’s primary goals, according to Miller.

“Every year, we just think about what we can do next to further simplify,” he said. “And so you’ve seen that as we’ve launched … things like S3 Intelligent-Tiering, which was really the cloud’s first storage class to automatically optimize and reduce customers’ costs for storage.”

One of the latest of these simplifying processes is S3 Multi-Region Access Points. This service provides a single endpoint to access data across different global regions, automatically routing requests to the nearest region.

“As [customers have] grown and their data needs grow around the world, they need to be using multiple AWS Regions to store and access that data,” Miller explained. “Sometimes it’s for low latency so that it can be closer to their end users or their customers; other times it’s for regions where they just have a particular need to have data in a particular geography.”

By simplifying otherwise complex operations like this, services like S3 let data experts focus on what they’re best at, and innovation and evolution will follow, Miller concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Storage Day event. (*Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for AWS Storage Day. 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