LAS VEGAS — There are four key initiatives that determine whether an enterprise will be successful in the cloud, according to Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Andy Jassy. These differences oftentimes illuminate a clear separation between enterprises that successfully move to the cloud and those that don’t, he said.

Enterprises have to foster senior-level alignment, an aggressive top-down goal to move fast, put a training program into action, and resist the tendency to get bogged down if some workloads can’t be moved to the cloud, Jassy said during a press conference at AWS re:Invent.

“Those to me are the four biggest difference makers in those [organizations] that make that transformation versus those that don’t,” he said.

AWS has determined that these objectives are imperative across all enterprises, regardless of size, industry, technical acumen, or inherent complexities.

“You have to have senior-level alignment and conviction that you’re going to make the move or it just doesn’t happen. Inertia is a very powerful thing — it’s easy to slow things down in the middle of organizations,” Jassy said. “If you don’t actually get your entire senior leadership team convicted that you’re going to make that move, it doesn’t happen.”

Part of this executive buy-in also requires enterprises to develop a process to address issues that will arise on a regular basis, he added. “People wouldn’t necessarily guess that non-technical issues like senior leadership are oftentimes the most important parts of the transformation, but a lot of time it is.”

“You need an aggressive top-down goal that forces the org to move faster than it organically otherwise would,” Jassy said, pointing to GE as one example of a massive business that has undertaken this approach to the cloud.

After some early pushback from technical leaders in GE, management pushed forward and deployed 42 applications in the cloud within 30 days, according to Jassy. During that time, GE also figured out models for security, governance, and client services.

Once that initial wave of applications moved to the cloud, GE’s leaders set out on a goal to move several thousand applications to AWS over the next few years. The company is about three-quarters of the way through that effort now and none of that would have happened without a deliberate push from upper management, Jassy explained.

“It’s really easy to be dipping your toe in the water for long periods of time if you don’t have an aggressive top-down goal,” he said.

Training is another area that’s too often left unaddressed when a company decides to move its services to the cloud. “A lot of times we have situations where people get excited about moving to the cloud and then they bring it back to their company and say ‘good news, here’s the cloud,’” but they neglect to train employees as part of that process, Jassy said.

“It’s not hard to use the cloud but you have to actually give people a little bit of training, which is why we train hundreds of thousands of customers every year,” he added.

Finally, Jassy said organizations have to keep their eye on the ball and not get disheartened when certain applications prove to be too difficult to move to the cloud. Successful organizations “don’t allow themselves to get paralyzed if they can’t figure out how to move every last workload,” he said.

“We do these deep portfolio analyses with our customers where we classify their applications into easy to move, medium-hard to move, [and] hardest to move should be the last because they’ve got a lot of legacy or dependencies,” Jassy said.

AWS also helps enterprises identify which applications should be rearchitected before moving to the cloud, he said, adding that, “What they find is a very large number of those workloads can pretty easily be moved to the cloud.”