Amazon Web Services – Is it the Right Fit for Your Business?

Amazon Web Services – Is it the Right Fit for Your Business?

Cloud technology adoption is growing in small and medium sized businesses. Once seen as ‘big business only’, this market is now growing at a rapid pace, pushed not only by more accessible and affordable solutions, but by external factors like the rise of cybersecurity threats to small businesses and the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. One of the most popular cloud technology options on the market is AWS (Amazon Web Services). In this article, we’ll take a look at this service and what you should consider to ensure it’s the right fit for your business.

What is AWS?

 Amazon Web Services may be slightly less well-known than the online shopping platform, but the reality is that this solution accounts for more than 50% of Amazon’s profit. This demonstrates just how popular it is!

It’s a comprehensive cloud platform that offers users a lot of functionality, with services ranging from database and software services to mobile, analytics and networking functionality. It also offers unlimited server capacity, state-of-the-art cybersecurity, and a very user-friendly interface.

Is AWS the Right Small Business Solution for Me?

Every solution has its strong points and drawbacks that make it more suited to one application than another. With cloud enterprise solutions, you want a solution and system that works for your business – not just the most popular option. Here are questions to ask your managed IT services provider to help determine if AWS is the right choice for your business.

• Is it easy to use? You shouldn’t have to be a cloud tech expert in order to access these services and benefits. Many cloud solutions suffer from this issue, being too complex for laypersons to understand, utilise and benefit from despite being highly-effective solutions.

 AWS is exceptionally user-friendly in this regard – it’s one of the reasons it has grown so popular, so quickly. The AWS Management Console is very accessible for anyone with decent IT knowledge – although, as always, it is helpful to have an IT professional manage the system, train you up and assist you in getting the very best from it.

• Is my business growing? Businesses that are expected to grow significantly in the short-to-long-term need a solution that is easily and affordably scalable, or you risk having to throw out your cloud solution entirely and invest in a new solution – a costly, frustrating and disruptive exercise.

AWS offers auto-scaling that adjusts capacity as your demand fluctuates, offers Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to match instances to workload, predictive scaling combined with machine learning to anticipate load, and the ability to optimise your solution for availability, cost or a balance between each element.

• Can I save money? Cost was one of the biggest factors that limited smaller businesses wanting to leverage the benefits of cloud technology. AWS overcomes this critical issue by offering a wide range of options you can set according to your own specifications to control costs effectively, as well as providing tiered pricing and costing models to assist businesses in understanding and controlling their cloud costs more effectively.

While the platform has an absolutely massive number of features and services, you only pay for the ones you want, minimising wastage. In addition, the cost model AWS offers allows you to bid, creating an on-demand pricing structure that can significantly reduce server costs.

• Is it secure?Cybercrime has been on the rise for decades, and COVID-19 has created a cybercrime pandemic, largely due to employees working remotely and businesses having little or no cybersecurity for remote working in place. In the Asia-pacific region alone, there were 216,0001 network attacks between January and July of this year, with Australia accounting for 14.23% of these.

AWS offers high encryption and automated security tasks through its Security by Design Service. This prevents unauthorised users from overriding critical functions, enabling real time auditing and operation of controls, and even implementing technical scripting for your business’s governance polity. Of course, this is only the start of implementing strong cybersecurity within your organisation, but it is a solid foundation to protecting critical employee, financial and project data.

Speak to managed IT Services Specialists About Moving onto AWS

If you are interested in finding out more about AWS or comparing different cloud solutions, be sure to talk to our team. We are fully independent, so we work to find the best solution for your needs rather than trying to push your business in a particular direction. We put customer service, ethics and reliability first – not profits.