Amazon Web Services and Zoom announced yesterday during the AWS Re:Invent conference that they are collaborating on new solutions for Zoom’s enterprise users, with the aim of making it easier for organisations to run hybrid office and remote work models.
AWS also announced that Zoom has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider in a multi-year agreement that extends the longstanding relationship between the two companies. Zoom will continue to leverage AWS’s global infrastructure and portfolio of services – including capabilities in compute, storage, content distribution, and security – to create a seamless, secure extension of its data centres.
AWS has supported Zoom since 2011. Earlier this year, when the COVID-19 pandemic began having an impact on businesses, schools, and governments around the world, Zoom expanded its relationship with AWS to keep up with surging demand as hundreds of millions of new Zoom participants began to use the platform for everything from online education to business meetings to social gatherings to exercise classes. Over the past year, Zoom use has increased from 10-million daily meeting participants in December 2019 to more than 300-million a day, regularly since April 2020. Beginning in February 2020, engineering teams from AWS and Zoom added tens of thousands of Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances (virtual servers) to Zoom’s overall capacity, adding thousands of instances in a day as usage demanded.
“With AWS, Zoom is ready to meet customer demand with low latency anywhere in the world, while continuously delivering new features that improve the Zoom user experience,” the companies said in a statement. “Today, leveraging AWS, Zoom is able to seamlessly scale with global demand for its services.”
Zoom now provides video conferencing technology to more than 130,000 schools globally at no charge, as well as millions of families and individuals, in addition to the company’s traditional enterprise-scale users – businesses, governments, healthcare and educational institutions, and other large organisations.
Tied to its sudden growth, Zoom also faced sharply increased demand for customer service over the past nine months as new users adopted its platform. AWS provided Zoom with over 1,000 Amazon WorkSpaces virtual desktops to help the company manage an unprecedented increase in demand for help desk support while its employees work remotely during the pandemic. AWS also provided additional cloud infrastructure and security monitoring support to help Zoom successfully stream major events more securely, including nationally-televised sporting and entertainment events, with a dedicated threat intelligence team monitoring Zoom’s AWS environments during the events.
Zoom and AWS say they are also making it increasingly easy and secure for businesses to employ hybrid workplace models where employees move seamlessly between home and the office. For instance, Zoom will be integrating its video meeting service into select Amazon Echo Show devices (Amazon’s Alexa-enabled smart display), as well as incorporating Alexa for Business features, including voice control, into its Zoom Rooms service.
Said Eric S. Yuan, CEO of Zoom: “Faced with unprecedented global demand this past year, we’ve been able to handle it in significant part by running the substantial majority of our cloud-based workloads on our preferred cloud provider, AWS, and relying on AWS’s performance and scalability. Looking forward, we will continue to innovate alongside AWS to reinvent virtual collaboration and deliver secure and exciting experiences for our customers.”
Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS: “COVID-19 changed everything for Zoom, putting demands on the company to meet the video conferencing needs of hundreds of millions of new participants around the globe, and AWS was there from the beginning to ensure Zoom could scale to meet these new requirements virtually overnight. When organizations build on AWS, they transform their business, expanding and innovating much faster.”