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Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Adam Selipsky earlier this week said the cloud is more critical now than ever before for enterprises and startups to be agile in uncertain macroeconomic times. 

Announcing launches during the company’s flagship event, AWS re: Invent, the CEO urged organisations to shift workloads to the cloud next year rather than shy away from it as it’s the “best way to improve cost-effectiveness”. 

“In times of uncertainty, it actually can be tempting to cut back, slow down. But when it comes to the cloud, many of our customers know that they should be leaning in precisely because of economic uncertainty, not despite it,” he said, adding that “cloud is emerging as a competitive differentiator”. 

The CEO reiterated that data migration to the cloud is suitable for organisations of any size. “It’s not just big companies [that have this technology]. According to PitchBook, there are more than a thousand unicorns in the world and the majority (83%) use AWS cloud. And over 90% of cloud-oriented startups also have their business on AWS,” he said at the annual AWS conference.

Big focus on Data 

Selipsky’s keynote also featured a strong emphasis on data, which he said will be at the core of every organisation’s decision-making and processes in the future. Companies would, however, need the right tools to store, analyse and extract insights. 

“We will double the amount of data in the world over the next few years. It is the cornerstone of digital transformation but working with data is tricky. You need integration, governance, and visualisation,” he said. 

The topics of water, and energy production and consumption also took up a significant portion of Selipsky’s focus. This comes as the cloud computing sector has raised eyebrows for the excessive use of natural resources required to deliver services.

During his speech, Selipsky also referred to the “just walk out” technology, which lets shoppers walk into a grocery store and walk out with their purchases without the inconvenience of checkout bills, and how a palm recognition service called Amazon One is reducing the need for standing in line.

Here are some of the top launches: 

—AWS Clean Rooms for advertisers to securely share data

—AWS Supply Chain, a cloud-based application that unifies data, provides ML-powered actionable insights, and offers built-in contextual collaboration.

—Amazon DataZone, a new data management service that will allow organisations to catalog, discover, share, and govern data at scale through a web portal.

—Amazon Security Lake that would centralises security data for quick risk response.

—Amazon Omics, a purpose-built service will enable scientists to store, query, and analyse large data sets pertaining to genomic, transcriptomic, and other omics data.