Amazon's new 'Snowball' box should worry Cisco, HP, IBM, and other big IT companies

Amazon has made it fast, easy, and cheap for big companies to move all of their data into Amazon's cloud so they can close down their in-house data centers.

Amazon is doing this with a creative new piece of hardware — a "box," if you will — called Snowball.

Companies rent the Snowball box from Amazon for as little as $200.

After the box is plugged in and the security is configured, it can vacuum ungodly amounts of data from a customer's data center into Amazon's cloud in a matter of hours or days instead of months or longer.

Amazon believes the turbo-charged pathway to its cloud will be a game changer. For instance, one company once came to Amazon wanting to move a bunch of apps and data into Amazon's Amazon Web Services cloud, but it couldn't.

It told the AWS team that "If we fully saturate our network, it would take us 8.5 years and want to shut our data center down faster than that," Amazon's cloud chief, Andy Jassy, told the crowd.

Big corporations are increasingly looking to cloud services as alternatives to maintaining expensive in-house data centers.

Capital One is in the process of closing down five of its eight data centers because it's moving its apps and tech into AWS, Capital One Chief Information Officer Rob Alexander told attendees. General Electric intends to move over 60% of the global workload into AWS, closing 30 of its 34 data centers.

And some companies, like Yamaha America are going all in with Amazon, closing all of their data centers altogether, saving $500,000 a year in the process.

This should worry the big IT vendors that sell severs, networking, storage, and other hardware, like Cisco, HP, and IBM. Like all big cloud companies, Amazon builds much of its own data-center hardware. Meanwhile, enterprises are saving money by not buying and maintaining all that gear themselves.