Delaware North vetted multiple cloud vendors, conducting cost and technical analyses on their offerings and paying close attention to reports by third-party analyst firms such as Gartner.

“From a CIO’s perspective, I looked very closely at the reputation and value proposition that each cloud vendor brought to the table. I needed to feel very good about the final decision,” says Quinlivan. “AWS had a compelling offering on all the criteria. It had a clear lead over the competition.”

He says the deep technology stack available on AWS was more than sufficient to meet the company’s technical and operational requirements. And the pricing structure of the AWS offerings, which includes paying only for what is used, provided total cost of ownership benefits that Quinlivan could present to senior leaders.

“We compared the costs of keeping our on-premises data center versus moving to the AWS cloud, measuring basic infrastructure items such as hardware cost and maintenance,” he says. “We estimate that moving to AWS will save us at least $3.5 million over five years by reducing our server hardware by more than 90 percent. But the cost savings will likely be greater due to additional benefits, like the increased compute capacity we can get using AWS. That lets us continually add more and larger workloads than we could using a traditional data center infrastructure, and achieve savings by only paying for what we use.”