Where can you rely on the cloud companies – and what do you have to be able to do yourself?
(Photo: AP)
The ambitions are – you know it from Amazon – gigantic. The Group’s cloud division wants to offer practically the entire range of IT from its own data centers, from simple storage space to algorithms with artificial intelligence. Available as a service, usable as required and at the push of a button.
The offer from Amazon Web Services (AWS), recently shown again at the re: Invent conference, gives IT departments all over the world an unprecedented level of flexibility. In the German economy and especially in key sectors such as mechanical and plant engineering and the automotive industry, however, it should raise a central strategic question: Where can you rely on the cloud companies – and what do you have to be able to do yourself?
The risk of losing part of the added value to AWS, Microsoft and Google is real, despite all the corporations’ assertions to the contrary. Because: The cloud specialists are now tailoring their offers to the needs of individual industries.
The market leader, for example, recently wants to make the creation of a digital twin of machines much easier with a new service – up to now this has been the domain of German machine builders. Predictive maintenance or the identification of errors in production has long been possible with AWS.
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Another innovation should frighten the telecommunications industry: AWS wants to make it much easier to set up a private network with the new 5G cellular standard. Customers simply mark on a map which area they want to cover, the company delivers the equipment and sets it up at the same time.
In many industries, the cloud will become an integral part of business in the future
These two examples show that in many industries the cloud is not only an important infrastructure, it will also become a central component of business in the future: It will serve as a platform for collecting, evaluating and marketing data.
Many companies will object that this is not new. In fact, automakers and some large suppliers are setting up their own departments for software development, and factory equipment manufacturers and machine builders are working on algorithms. Compared to AWS and its competitors, however, these ambitions often seem small. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to change that now.
More: Amazon’s quantum cloud: from research laboratory to industrial application