Amazon Web Services rolled into London this week to promote its cloud operations and discuss the impact AI will have on the sector.
As the world’s biggest cloud company, AWS has customers from across the globe, but at the AWS Summit London, it showcased the impact cloud was having on sectors ranging from media to energy.
TechInformed was on the ground at the London Excel to hear from two AWS customers about their experiences and how cloud has transformed their operations and security.
Untold stories
During the keynote, AWS then showcased several partner use cases.
One cloud case study presented at this year’s AWS Summit London was of media production studio Untold.
Untold Studios launched in 2018 as the world’s first fully cloud-based studio, and the London-based firm has grown from a startup to a global creative powerhouse with 500 professionals worldwide.
Under Rochelle Palmer’s leadership, the studio has delivered high-profile projects including Billie Eilish performances and, most recently, five simultaneous Super Bowl commercials in 2025.
Palmer said in the keynote that the company’s strategic partnership with AWS enabled it to handle complex projects like recreating the Aberfan disaster, a catastrophic coal tip collapse, for “The Crown” and seamlessly transition during COVID-19 while other studios struggled.
The studio recently delivered five complex Super Bowl commercials simultaneously, including transforming singer Seal into a seal for Mountain Dew and creating a talking beluga whale played by Kieran Culkin.
At launch, the challenge for Untold was that it needed access to a large pool of freelancers to develop innovative visual effects for TV shows such as The Crown. But these freelancers weren’t necessarily UK-based, so Untold sought a partner to provide a scalable technology platform that its freelance pool could access worldwide.
“As a startup, we needed technology that enabled performance, fast time-to-market, and minimal expenditure,” says Sam Reid, head of technology for Untold Studios.
“We wanted to find a better, more flexible way to build a creative studio, where we could access talent regardless of location, and the underlying technology could scale with the demands and needs of the business,” Reid says.
“We also wanted to be able to hit the ground running and take on large projects right away. We knew this would require us to break the mould and be innovative in our approach.”
Untold Studios partnered with AWS on a solution that would offer both compute power for rendering and processing, as well as support cloud-based workflows, through Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud G4 instances.
Untold Studios used AWS to create five ads for the 2025 Super Bowl
It also opted to store data in Amazon Simple Storage Service to support its team of more than 100 designers, filmmakers, artists, animators and photographers.
After getting off the ground in just six months – instead of the months it would have taken through the traditional approach – Untold Studios is now pioneering the integration of generative AI within the creative industry. It uses Amazon Bedrock and other AI tools to enhance creative output while maintaining precise creative control.
“We are turning visual AI from a mere toy into a powerful tool,” Palmer explains during the AWS keynote.
“Our collaborations with renowned directors and artists have taught us one crucial lesson: Precise creative control is non-negotiable. We are integrating our AI tools within our AWS ecosystem and leveraging Amazon Bedrock and other AI tools to supercharge creative output and deliver content more efficiently than ever.”
BP and Wiz
Another case study presented at the Summit was from petroleum giant BP. In 2019, the firm shut all its European mega data centres and migrated all data and 900 key applications to AWS, as part of an acceleration to the cloud.
The two European mega data centres, the largest that BP operates globally, hosted data from across all BP’s businesses, with the firm saying 95% of its servers are now in the cloud.
Mark Webber, Head of AWS Platforms, BP, explains: “Almost 100% of instances that can be moved to the cloud have been moved there. It has been a big success.”
Webber adds that BP opted against a wider transformation journey, instead focussing on a “lift and shit” approach that saw applications implemented directly in the cloud. This initially involved using a shared accounts approach, but BP then took a federated option, which meant each application team could access their own account, allowing for greater flexibility.
He adds: “More recently, our focus has been on containerisation, which has gone slower, because it is a lot harder than virtualising a server.” Containerisation, according to AWS, is a software deployment process that bundles an application’s code with all the files and libraries it needs to run on any infrastructure.
The relationship has developed both ways, Webber reveals, saying that AWS has also become a customer of BP, buying 600 megawatts of renewable energy from the company each year, to power between five and ten of its data centres in Europe.
The presentation, however, was with AWS partner Wiz, who provide cloud security services to enterprises, including BP.
Webber says one big challenge in securing the shift to cloud was how to modernise its security tools when it moved servers over to AWS, and to fill any gaps it had in its traditional set-up.
“A lot of the talk was about servers, but there was very little conversation about any other security aspects of the cloud. It was very traditional. Nobody wanted to talk in terms of the user experience.”
BP uses ServiceNow, which Webber said played the role of a “pivot table” for issues and tickets, which were being raised for every single issue.
“That means we had servers knocking around 80,000 tickets in service, and my team asking how they are supposed to work through that level. It just wasn’t achievable.”
What compounded this, he adds, is that BP did not have any access to a contextualised view of its cloud risk, with different teams focussed on their specific area of expertise. “Server teams were focussed on server vulnerabilities, while the identity team was focussed on identity, and everybody had their own view of the application teams.”
This disjointed approach, he adds, meant teams were focussed more on operation system patching than the applications themselves, leading to “misconfiguration” in many native services.
“It was a kind of organised chaos, and it really couldn’t carry on – we had to control stuff centrally.”
The wonderful Wiz-ard
Wiz – a cloud security platform – was most recently in the news after Google announced a deal to acquire the company for $32 billion.
Its mission is to create secure cloud environments for enterprise partners by creating a normalising layer that helps them identify – and remove – critical risks.
“We are less federated as an organisation,” explains Webber. “When it came to choosing Wiz, it was all about democratisation for us.”
He explains that once BP had partnered with Wiz, they were able to roll it out across the organisation’s various parts, and because the platform is multicloud, it would “just light up”.
Wiz, he adds, became “a gold mine of information” and is a great example of how powerful a graph database can be when filled with relevant data.
BP now has around 250 daily users, which, Webber smiles, is “almost too high” but most of these, he adds, are not security people, but are across app development, engineering and operations roles.
“We’ve never had a heavy training programme rolled out,” he adds. “We shared a few videos, but we haven’t pushed a hard level of training – people just come naturally to it.”
Using Wiz has helped BP to get visibility over all of the technologies it is using, he adds, saying this has been a challenge for the energy giant in the past.
“We switched on Wiz and suddenly a list of 350 technologies comes up,” he says. “And we can see exactly what they are using – all of the different software products, all of the native products. So our architecture teams all love it.
Wiz solutions engineer Phil Woon, who joins Webber on stage, asks the BP man if there was anything he would do differently in the switch to cloud and adoption of cloud security.
“We moved at a good pace, and uptake has been high, but I think we could have focussed more on the operate model and the cultural change,” he replies.
“There is still a feeling around how much you can trust the app teams, but I think if we had set that operate model and been clearer around accountabilities, it would have solved some of those concerns.”
How could you do that? “We could have appointed more champions and embedded that further, because it is built into the Wiz system to use tags. That could have come down from the top, from leadership.”
