At Long Last, Amazon Brings Its Cloud to Canada

Today is a big day for Canada and for Canadian businesses.

Amazon Web Services has just launched their Region (multiple data centres) in Montreal. If you’re in the IT world, unless you’ve been living under rock, you would know that Amazon is the biggest global provider of cloud services to businesses. And finally that innovation and scale is available within our Canadian shores.

For those concerned about hosting their data in Canada, this is especially a grand day.

If you are new to this whole cloud thing, it’s time to splash your face with some cold water. It’s not just an abstract thing any longer, it’s very real, very large and the new normal. And it is continuing to sweep massive changes to how we operate infrastructure and more importantly develop technology. GE, one of the most recognized leaders in business, are migrating 9,000 workloads to the cloud, mostly to AWS, and transforming their business.

The list goes on: Johnson & Johnson, McDonald’s, NASA. Major technology players like Salesforce and Workday have committed to hosting their platforms on AWS. VMWare is on board announcing a partnership with AWS to host their customers and platform on AWS.

Digital transformation strategies are moving from boardrooms to reality. The Cloud is a big part of that effectively turning every business into a technology business. Ultimately it means every organization must be a technology organization to survive.

The impact is going to be one of two things, you adopt and start jumping aboard the pace of change… or your IT withers on the vine and you get out-competed or disrupted.

Even if you’re a public sector organization, your customers, the voting public, are going to be demanding new digital services, no business or organization is immune to this change.

This is no longer a “It will take those guys years to get there” scenario. Things are measured in months or days. Just look at your new SaaS based applications. Releases are coming out weekly, and bug fixes daily. They can make these quick changes as they are all hosted on the Cloud.

AWS themselves are innovating at such a rapid pace. At their annual re:Invent conference last week on top of the 60 successful services, they announced 20 new services, that’s 33% percent more on an already diverse and powerful platform. The conference grew from 19,000 to 32,000 attendees year over year. Another strong sign big change is afoot.

As AWS’ only Canadian based Premier partner we are leading this change. Over the last 4 years, TriNimbus has successfully migrated and dealt with thousands of workloads on AWS, for enterprise, public sector and software and technology companies. TriNimbus has also been an advocate for a Canadian AWS Region since day 1 – we have listed reasons and presented our customers case to AWS for years. Finally this day has dawned and we couldn’t be more excited!

I love this country. It’s been my home for 20 years. Canada it’s time to take on Cloud and leap aboard. Or we will be left far behind.

It’s game on!

Jarrod Levitan is the founder of TriNimbus.