Regardless of the industry, data has become the backbone of our growing economies, and the need to protect personal and sensitive data is a top priority. Combined with new technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (AI) gaining momentum, the cloud offers a highly secure and cost-effective starting point for any organization striving to meet this economic opportunity.

When change is a constant, cloud technology is the best bet for businesses and governments to adapt to headwinds, scale innovation, and architect their security to meet the needs of customers and citizens today and into the future.

We saw this first-hand with accelerated digital transformation during the pandemic. Enterprises like Zoom scaled up their services from 10 million active users to 300 million, which also required them to scale up advanced security threat detection and incidence response systems in order to defend their network.

Telemedicine startups such as Doctor Anywhere and Halodoc spearheaded new business models rapidly in ASEAN on the cloud, thereby ensuring high availability of patient care services and security of sensitive patient data.

Public sector organizations also offered digital contactless citizen services at speed across the globe. India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s launched the Co-WIN app that scaled to support 10 million user registrations for vaccinations daily. All of this was done on the cloud, the best playground for innovation.

Innovation powered by digital technologies enables experimentation, which can present new challenges to businesses and organizations. While all risk cannot be eliminated, organizations can’t afford to slow the innovation process by applying rigid security measures either.

How can companies achieve this? As Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon and ex-CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS), famously said, “Invention requires two things: One, the ability to try a lot of experiments, and two, not having to live with the collateral damage of failed experiments”. 

Modern cloud security approaches allow organizations to move fast and stay secure, avoiding rigid and excessive controls, in favor of embedded security and a high level of automation. Companies innovating on the cloud gain access to world-class security at every stage, from planning, design, and testing, to deployment, maintenance and improvement. This allows companies to both innovate securely, and leverage security innovations.

So, how do cloud services help balance security and innovation without compromising cost-effectiveness?

Cloud services are being leveraged by organizations across industries including the government of Telangana in India, the Digital Agency in Japan, Samsung Electronics, and Singapore’s Health Information Integration System. We build security features into our cloud infrastructure to help customers meet the requirements of even the most security-sensitive organizations, such as governments, financial services institutions, and healthcare institutions.

Using cloud services allows customers to cut back on work that they typically would have had to manage themselves: customers benefit from the size and scale of global cloud infrastructure; proactive efforts by cloud service providers (CSPs) to drive innovation with cutting-edge technology; and the automation of security measures.

Democratizing access to security technology levels the playing field for innovation by reducing barriers to entry for startups and small and medium-sized businesses. By bringing down access costs, using the cloud lets smaller companies have the same cutting-edge security services used by large enterprises. These include those enhanced by AI and machine learning (ML).

CSPs continually reinvest in security for the benefit of customers. AWS updates its security capabilities to keep pace with evolving global security issues, in order to offer customers up-to-speed protection services. For example, we help empower organizations to protect themselves against ransomware with a range of security capabilities.

Open standards, such as the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF), further simplify security monitoring. The OCSF makes it possible to take in data across different systems, compile and analyze them collectively, then make sense of security issues to be raised by priority. This info is put up on a dashboard which reduces complexity, and time spent on sense-making and monitoring. This enables organizations using cloud to optimize security productivity costs by shifting to higher-level security tasks.

Companies on the cloud can reinvest security cost savings into innovation. Being on the cloud minimizes fixed expenses and operational overheads (such as provisioning, managing, and securing data centers). It also reduces the complexity of managing multiple security services, and allows businesses to pay only for what they consume. With a secure cloud infrastructure, and access to native cloud security tools, customers can enjoy better levels of security than before, at lower cost.

Security does not impede innovation. Cloud technology enables organizations of all sizes, across all industries, to leverage highly secure digital technologies for driving cutting-edge innovation. With the right security culture, and access to the great security technology available on the cloud, organizations are better equipped for innovation.

We should embrace cloud security as an essential prerequisite for innovation, and use these critical tools to survive and seize the enormous economic opportunity Asia holds.

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The writer is head of security Asia Pacific & Japan commercial at Amazon Web Services.