Since necessity is the mother of invention, an organization’s cloud journey is often prompted by the need to unravel more computing capabilities, such as enhanced analytics.

But the journey to the cloud isn’t always smooth sailing. It can be a daunting task for enterprises, a fact that Amazon Web Services Inc. has tackled head on through its suite of capabilities, including AWS DataSync and Storage Gateway, according to Randy Boutin (pictured, right), general manager of DataSync at AWS.

“Storage Gateway is primarily a means for a customer to access their data in the cloud from on-prem,” Boutin stated. “Customers use DataSync for their initial migration. Once you get your data into the cloud, that flywheel of potential starts to take hold. And customers want to ultimately move that data within the cloud to optimize its value. You might move from EFS to S3, etc., to enable the cloud flywheel to benefit you. DataSync does that as well.”

Boutin and Mat Mathews (pictured, left), general manager of AWS Transfer Family, spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante at the recent AWS Storage Day, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio.  They discussed how AWS is easing cloud migration woes within the enterprise. (* Disclosure below.)

The power of the cloud

Digital transformation has made cloud migration a necessity. This has been advantageous based on the myriad of opportunities and innovations opened, Mathews pointed out.

“The real benefit that we see is that once your data’s in the cloud, it opens up the power of the cloud for analytics, for new application development, and things of that sort,” he explained. “So what we’re seeing is that companies are really just focused on understanding cloud-migration strategy and how they can get their data there and then use that to unlock that data for the value.”

AWS uses various tools to estimate the cloud’s running cost by accessing the performance on-prem. Furthermore, Storage Gateway helps enterprises juggle workloads between on-prem and the cloud, according to Boutin.

“We have tools to help you understand your existing on-prem workloads, understand what services in the AWS offering align to those needs, but also help you estimate the cost,” he said. “If you have an application that you want to keep on-prem, you’re not ready yet to migrate that application to the cloud, Gateway is a strong solution, because you can move a lot of your cold or long-tail data into something like S3 or EFS but still access it from your on-prem location.”

Based on the value generated by data, AWS enables enterprises to seamlessly exchange data over existing protocols, which makes the cloud journey easy, according to Mathews. This enables data to be unlocked using analytics.

“We just announced AS2 protocol, which is very heavily used in supply chains to exchange inventory and information across multi-tiers of partners and things of that nature,” he stated. “Historically, customers have had protocols like SFTP or FTP to help them interface with or exchange data or files with external partners.”

The AS2 protocol is an RFC-defined file-transmission specification that includes strong message protection and verification mechanisms.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS Storage Day:

(* 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