Amazon CTO Vogels: Cloud computing an option for disaster recovery

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said Tuesday that enterprises are increasingly using Amazon Web Services for disaster recovery.

Vogels, speaking at the Supernova conference in San Francisco (follow on Twitter), made the remarks during a cloud computing 101 talk.

While Vogels covered a lot of well covered ground---at least for folks that cover cloud computing regularly---his disaster recovery statement stuck out from an IT management perspective.

"Enterprises are writing enormous checks to disaster recovery companies," said Vogels.

It's a point well taken. Disaster recovery is a huge business that really took off after the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. If Amazon Web Services becomes a viable disaster recovery option it could be very disruptive.

Other odds and ends:

• Vogels walked through a few more use cases. Marketing campaigns are using Amazon to scale up at launches.
• Netflix is using Amazon Web Services to reach peak streaming demand.
• Intuit uses Amazon to scale up during tax season.
• And Eli Lilly is a big Amazon Web Services customer. The Eli Lilly case was also presented at a recent Gartner conference.

The common thread: Companies are looking to manage uncertainty. "New uncertainties (in business and IT) require new resource models," said Vogels.