Ward explained that Kempinski selected AWS out of three possible cloud providers, though he did not want to reveal the names of the other two, as the hotel group still works with them in other areas.

"After a number of meetings it became obvious to me that AWS was the best fit for our requirements. We wanted a solution where we could have a number of base servers that we knew would be running most of the time, but also have a number of servers running in a specific environment - such as a training environment - where they would be switched off for a significant amount of time during the year," said Ward.

"When we run a training course, which may be one week in any month, we are able to switch that environment on, pay for our consumption as we go, and then when the training is done we reset the images, turn those servers off and the images still sit on AWS. However, we don't pay for them whilst they are switched off."

He added: "Out of the companies we were talking to, they couldn't do that for us. With the other two, once you had committed to having an image up on their solution, you pay for it whether you are using it or not."

Ward said that he also went with AWS because they introduced Kempinski to , a consulting service that the hotel group is using to help get its infrastructure into the cloud, and will then manage it after the project is complete.