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What Is AWS?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud provider that offers computing power, database and file storage, content delivery, web hosting, and more to businesses around the world. It offers both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) functionality and includes a wide variety of services, depending on your computing or storage needs, that can be integrated into a fully functioning solution.
The most commonly used services are Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Block Store (EBS), Elastic File System (EFS), and Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2). For a full list of services available, check out the AWS listing.
AWS is available in 18 Regions across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and South America, all of which are isolated from each other for increased fault tolerance and stability. Within each region are several Availability Zones which provide internal fault tolerance and allow you to minimize latency and distribute workloads. Multiple regions can be used but data is transferred at a higher price.
Why Move Your Business to AWS?
There are numerous benefits to moving your business to the cloud, many of which are covered here.
Cost-Effective
The most often cited benefit of AWS is its cost-effectiveness. Moving to a cloud service can allow you to avoid or reduce the costs associated with developing and operating an on-premise infrastructure as it allows you to outsource the purchase of servers and the IT hours necessary to maintain them. When using cloud services you pay for resources, such as storage and computing power, as you use them rather than paying in advance for resources you foresee needing in the future or continuing to pay off those you no longer need.
Elastic and Scalable
Connected to cost-saving are AWS’ built-in auto-scaling and elastic load balancing features. Many AWS services are scalable, meaning you won’t get charged for resources you aren’t using, provided you monitor and configure them appropriately. This can be accomplished on many services with no downtime, so you won’t lose out on productivity. The load balancing features distribute your processing and traffic demands across multiple resources to reduce latency and increase throughput. It is relatively easy to move resources or change services as needed and you can change the architecture of your system without worrying about needing to change hardware configurations.
Data Protection
AWS services provide data and resource redundancy to eliminate single points of failure and ensure that data is available to you as long as you have an Internet connection. AWS Backup allows you to centralize and automate the backup of your data across the services you are using, protecting you from data loss due to system failure, human error, or malware infection. The ability to control access and use permissions keeps your data protected from being breached and maintains data privacy.
Security
If you don’t have security experts in-house or have experts who are responsible for more than security, AWS might provide more security than your current system. It offers end-to-end protection and handles the certificates, protocols, and updates necessary for built-in security. AWS provides encryption of data at rest and in-transit, firewall protection, and identity and access permission management services. Many of its services meet major compliance standards and can be integrated with third-party tools for added security and monitoring.
Flexibility
AWS services are OS independent and can support applications written in almost any programming language. You can customize how your data is migrated to the cloud, which services you use, and how you use them. You can integrate a wide variety of third-party services through the API if AWS doesn’t provide the functionality you want. All of your configuration, architecture, and permissions are customizable and controlled by you and Amazon provides plenty of documentation on recommended settings to optimize your set-up.
Increased Performance
Cloud servers can provide access to significant amounts of processing power and AWS services, like Lambda, can eliminate the need for processes to be run in your environment. With AWS you have the option to deploy your products directly from the cloud as cloud-native or containerized applications and you can spread your workload across multiple resources to boost performance.
Increased Productivity
Cloud services provide access to up to date data and applications to anyone that is within a utilized region, meaning that you and your team can work remotely to achieve productivity and collaboration from almost anywhere. AWS can ensure a more consistent experience for customers by routing them to the servers in their area with the lowest latency and avoiding service outages through the use of mirrored availability zones or regions.
Wrap Up
Businesses are increasingly moving to the cloud to gain the benefits covered here, often with the added benefit of increasing their competitiveness. Start-ups can rapidly grow while avoiding heavy initial technology costs and large corporations can gain data redundancy and take advantage of widespread resources for the globalization of services.
If you have decided that migrating to the cloud might serve you, take the next step and begin researching what migration strategies will work best for your data.