Retailer Takes Control of Its Cloud

“Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM,” as the old IT bon mot goes. The corollary for today’s cloud-based world could well be, “Nobody ever got fired for signing a deal with Amazon.com.”

Inking a standard infrastructure-as-a-service deal with the big-name provider has clear benefits for many companies–scalability, flexibility, lower capital costs. But in exchange, cloud customers have typically given up much control.

When Chico’s CIO Eric Singleton first signed a deal with Amazon Web Services to put the retailer’s new customer information analytics systems in the cloud in mid-2013, that was a reasonable trade-off. He wanted to get up and running quickly with a small pilot.

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