| | September 20158CIOReviewEmbracing Hybrid Cloud with AWSBy Joe Fuller, VP/CIO, Dominion EnterprisesI'm CIO of Dominion Enterprises, based in Norfolk, VA. We're formerly known as Trader Publishing Company. Until 4 years ago you could buy Trader's flagship product, Auto Trader magazine, for a dollar at convenience stores across the country. In its heyday, Trader distributed 8 million magazines weekly, bringing buyers and sellers together in all the classifieds categories at $39 per photo ad. In the mid 90's, Trader was a print behemoth, with revenues over $1 Billion supported by 12 printing plants. The Internet changed all that. Home buyers, apartment seekers and vehicle traders could be matched 24x7 for as low as free on the Web. Fortunately, Trader invested in the Internet too. I joined as Operations Manager for their Internet division in 1997. Today as Dominion Enterprises, 85percent of our revenue is derived from digital operations. We're still in the classifieds game, but the game has changed. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a growing player in that change.As CIO, I'm responsible for maintaining a reliable hosting infrastructure for Homes.com, ForRent.com, Boattrader.com and 23 other classifieds portals. We operate two data centers. One is in our home office in Norfolk, VA and the other is leased in Ashburn, VA, where 75percent of U.S. Internet traffic flows daily. My team's job is to help 39 separate operating units leverage our own facilities and the public cloud. We have significant operations in Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.AWS probably snuck into your business as Shadow IT. I was introduced to Shadow IT during the late 2010 budget season. A developer in our employment advertising business told me he would not be hosting their new web applications in our data center the next year. He said he had used his company credit card to purchase platform-as-a-service computing from Heroku. He planned to host greenfield apps there during development and move them into production there as they grew. I asked if he had included my team in his planning and he deadpanned, "why would I?" I explored the reasons behind his decision and found them to be rational and compelling. This new way of developing, testing and deploying applications was cheap. It deferred capital investments and allowed development teams to go fast. I understood this new computing paradigm would change the way my IT group did business and I wanted to embrace it.opinionin my
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