Accelerating Application Deployment Through the Cloud
John Landwehr, VP & Public Sector CTO, Adobe
How Adobe Met Amazon in Three Acts:
Applications Go Live:
The business owners are anxious to deploy their newly acquired enterprise software solutions. The boxes of software DVDs sit idle for months as the server hardware and network infrastructure is carefully planned to meet all future needs of application scalability and reliability. Meanwhile, the organization’s datacenter is checked for corresponding rack space, power, cooling, and bandwidth needs. The new dedicated hardware eventually arrives at the loading dock, and enterprise software and hardware finally meet at the datacenter. All three elements are critical to bring the applications online - but the Authority to Operate is still months away, because the hardware still needs operating systems, other pre-requisite software, lots of configuration, testing, and especially security assessments. Eventually the applications go live, and the team already begins to dread the future hardware refresh, and hopes to have enough scalability to meet the forecasted demand. The business owners now have spreadsheets full of line items to monitor all the ongoing operational expenses.
Tracking cost of ownership is greatly simplified as hardware and datacenter expenses are consolidated 
Streamline Go-Live Process:
As organization’s datacenters become overcrowded, the cloud arrives just in time with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), virtualization, elastic computing, and multiple availability zones – significantly reducing the infrastructure costs while increasing scalability and reliability. Tracking cost of ownership is greatly simplified, as hardware and datacenter expenses are consolidated, but every new software acquisition still requires significant configuration and testing of the infrastructure for new software to be deployed. As months go by, business owners increasingly become impatient as they thought the promise of the cloud was supposed to significantly streamline the go-live process in addition to saving infrastructure costs. By the time the first application is deployed, it’s already out of date and newer vendor software is available that would greatly support the business mission. The planning for application refreshes on the infrastructure remains hazy.
Reduced IT Backlog:
Software as a Service (SaaS) arrives. Infrastructure dialtone becomes application dialtone, as new software capabilities are quickly provisioned through a single service acquisition. Infrastructure is perfectly matched to the software, and continuously delivered with security controls, end-to-end monitoring, and ongoing maintenance, upgrades, and support – from a single solution provider. The IT backlog is now reduced, so enterprise resources can focus on bringing new services online more quickly, with better digital experiences for internal and external users. This is where Adobe and Amazon met in 2008 to deliver industry leading enterprise solutions for commercial and government customers globally. Given the infrastructure benefits of AWS, Adobe has been able to quickly expand its SaaS portfolio and change the way value is delivered to customers with greater scalability, reliability and global availability.
Public sector enterprises are especially driven to the cloud by data center consolidation efforts and the need to reduce budgets; however, this transition also has an increased responsibility - security. To consistently address cloud security requirements for government, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) was developed, and has been viewed as the highest bar for commercial and government cloud security around the world. In 2015, Adobe attained FedRAMP authorization for its first wave of SaaS and PaaS applications delivered through the AWS cloud and became the first FedRAMP authorized cloud service provider to deliver: Web content management and digital asset management, Electronic forms with eSignatures, Digital Rights Managements, Web-conferencing and eLearning.
With these services, Adobe offers secure cloud solutions that are continuously delivered with ongoing updates and enhancements. Enterprises now have access to the services that will increase operational efficiencies, reduce costs and respond faster to end user needs. These Adobe solutions enable organizations to create outstanding digital experiences and become more efficient while securing mission-critical content across all devices.
