Congratulation on deciding or even considering to move your business to the cloud! You have taken another right decision in making your business secure, scalable and efficient. Now the next important question that you might have is to decide which cloud platform is best among the various options which are currently available including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform etc. In next few paragraphs, I am going to highlight why AWS should be on the top of the list.
Security & Compliance
Security has always been a topmost priority and area of concerns for anyone who is moving to cloud. Therefore AWS gives customers ownership and control over their customers content by design through simple but powerful tools that allow customers to determine where their customer content will be stored, secure their customer content in transit or at rest, and manage access to AWS services and resources. AWS also provides most of the top global and regional compliance programs such as CSA, ISO, SOC, HIPAA etc. These are important for companies working in the fields such as finance, healthcare, audit, government, and many other sectors.
Availability
The AWS cloud infrastructure is built around Regions and Availability Zones(AZs). Availability Zones are single data center units which are connected with low latency, high throughput, and highly redundant networking. Currently, AWS Cloud has 55 AZs within 18 geographic Regions. Also, 12 new Availability Zones in four new geographic regions are coming up in next few months. These AZs offer an easier and more effective way to design and operate applications, making them more highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable than single datacenter infrastructure.
In addition to the AZs, AWS also has several CloudFront Edge locations which provide low latency connectivity for static contents by bringing it close to the customers. This is really very important for companies which serve huge contents and have their customer base all around the world.
Rich Ecosystem
Amazon offers a wide range of cloud services to its customers which have different needs and requirements. Apart from the core services which include compute, storage, database and networking it has now expanded its portfolio with ‘Rich Platform Services’ which includes analytics, enterprise applications, mobile services and Internet of things(IoT) and ‘Developer Productivity and Operational Efficiency’ which includes developer tools, management tools, security & identity and application services. This has truly made AWS a one-stop shop for everyone from a small startup to billion-dollar enterprise.
Apart from the numbers of services discussed above, AWS has also developed a strong network of partners who offer solutions build on the top of the available services to cater the unique and specific requirements of AWS customers.
Ease of Use & Implementation
With so many tools and services available with just a click away, AWS allows companies to provision and deploy the cloud infrastructure in few minutes as compared to the days and months with the traditional approach. This is important when, for example, a company needs to run an event that is going to generate a lot of traffic for a short period of time. AWS has made the system a self-service which only require few simple inputs to set things up and running. AWS also organize free training programs, workshops and certifications to skill individuals with AWS technologies. This means the current IT force can be used to implement and maintain the AWS infrastructure.
To make the implementation easier and smooth, AWS provides enough credit to run EC2 micro instance 24/7 and free initial usage limit for many of its services. This gives the users, especially the startups a chance not only to try the new services but also to use it without paying any amount for a specific limit.
Pay-As-You-Go Pricing
AWS pricing is similar to how you pay for utilities like water and electricity. You only pay for the number of services you consume, and once you stop using them there is no additional cost or termination fee. This model is advantageous in many ways. First, you can start developing new projects with minimal upfront cost and scale up or down the resources based on your business needs at any given point. Second, paying as you go allows you to be more flexible as you can easily adapt to the ever-changing needs of your business.
AWS is constantly lowering the pricing of its services and we don’t expect that to change in the future. Recently AWS has changed the billing rate of most of its services from per hours use to per seconds use which further reduces the chances for paying for the unutilized services. This means that AWS will be more affordable as you start using it.
Consistency & Reliability
While AWS is an extremely useful platform for backups and disaster recovery, it is also extremely reliable. As per an independent review has found that since 2015, AWS has been far better at keeping its public cloud services running than either Microsoft or Google.
AWS continuously invests in creating new services and works with customers to build reliable, resilient architect and therefore has established as the top choice for many companies. Gartner, which is a reputed and independent research organization has consistently been ranking AWS as the top leader in the cloud business for six straight years.According to Gartner, AWS is a mature provider which has a diverse customer base and the broadest range of use cases including enterprise mission-critical application.
Anant has a proven record of helping enterprises migrate to the cloud and achieve their business goals. Contact us today if you wish to streamline your business processes, improve efficiency and scalability of your IT systems!
