Amazon Web Services has announced that Zoom Video Communications has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider. The multi-year agreement extends the longstanding relationship between the two companies, enabling Zoom to rapidly scale its service on the world’s leading cloud, rise to the challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, and deliver reliable services and continuous innovation for its expanding base of corporate and individual customers. Zoom will continue to leverage AWS’s global infrastructure and unmatched portfolio of services – including capabilities in compute, storage, content distribution, and security – to create a seamless, secure extension of its data centers. In addition, AWS and Zoom are collaborating to develop new solutions for Zoom’s enterprise users, leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS to integrate Zoom services with Amazon devices and capabilities to make it easier for organizations to run hybrid office and remote work models.
“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”
AWS has supported Zoom since 2011, and earlier this year when the COVID-19 pandemic began impacting 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 has grown on AWS to accommodate an increase 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 worked around the clock and across remote locations to securely and reliably meet the needs of this vast, globally dispersed user community, adding tens of thousands of Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances (virtual servers) to Zoom’s overall capacity, even 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. 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 organizations.
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, standing up a dedicated threat intelligence team to monitor Zoom’s AWS environments during the events.
Zoom and AWS 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. In addition, Zoom and AWS are deepening their collaboration to reimagine the future of online communication, leveraging AWS’s unmatched portfolio of services, with capabilities in machine learning, threat monitoring and response, encryption, and data visualization, to innovate new features, products, and services for Zoom users.
“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,” said Eric S. Yuan, CEO of Zoom. “Looking forward, we will continue to innovate alongside AWS to reinvent virtual collaboration and deliver secure and exciting experiences for our customers.”
“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,” said Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS. “When organizations build on AWS – as Zoom has done since 2011 – they transform their business, expanding and innovating much faster. Together, Zoom and AWS have delivered great experiences for new Zoom users around the world, and we look forward to using the cloud to develop new ways to help the world communicate.”
