What is Amazon Web Services (AWS)?
Amazon Web Services is a Cloud computing platform. You may have noticed increased chatter about “Cloud” computing in recent years. More than just an application, AWS can be a platform to host some or all of your business’ infrastructure in the Cloud.
Many businesses are choosing to break from the traditional model of hosting one or more servers in-house: email server, file server, database, and so on. This is happening because on-site hardware is costly to purchase and maintain, requires your staff’s time to manage, and for many businesses represents a single point of failure.
How does it work? What are the benefits?
The Amazon Web Services infrastructure is shared between all of its customers. Your business will effectively leverage the buying power of hundreds of thousands of organizations who already work with Amazon Web Services. As a result, your business will enjoy the advantages of a highly-redundant, highly-available infrastructure that can grow or shrink on the fly to meet changing computing needs. Because of this economy of scale and Amazon Web Services’ pricing model, in many cases this can be achieved for a lower cost than traditional in-house infrastructure.
Redundant means that the Amazon Web Services infrastructure is not tied to a specific computer, network, or power source, so that your services can remain online in the event that some services are affected. This redundancy is costly to achieve with in-house architecture, but built in to the AWS platform, and may be a requirement if your business is required to meet standards like HIPAA, PCI, or SOX.
High-availability describes the ability of a system to stay operational. Because Amazon’s computing environment can be distributed among multiple computers, networks, and even datacenters, your Cloud Infrastructure can be guaranteed to remain online at a very high percentage that would be costly or impossible to achieve with traditional infrastructure. The potential value of high-availability can be incalculable when considering the cost of lost work, or the inability to access a critical application.
The ability to grow and shrink on-demand is referred to as Elasticity. In contrast to traditional infrastructure, this means that your company. An additional advantage is that services at Amazon Web Services can be priced so that you pay only for the processing power that your business uses.
Is Amazon Web Services right for my business?
Advanced knowledge can be required to move your business to Amazon Web Services. The good news is that a Trusted IT Partner with proven AWS expertise can guide your business through a migration, maintaining the look and feel that your employees expect, and ensure that your data and applications work seamlessly in the cloud. Once configured, infrastructure hosted AWS usually requires no more maintenance than a similar in-house infrastructure.
To find out how your business can leverage the power and efficiency of Amazon Web Services, contact Roan Solutions today. Our AWS experts will assess your company’s existing infrastructure, and its current and projected needs to provide you with the best possible solution.
