With normal ways of doing business disrupted indefinitely—consumers stuck at home and shopping online, and businesses working remotely —it’s never been more important for your enterprise to have a rock-solid, reliable online platform. That makes the question of where and how to host – a critical concern. A few years ago, public clouds were a choice reserved for only the “safest” of workloads. These days, businesses of all sizes are putting even their most sensitive workloads in the public cloud. By the end of 2021, over 59% of businesses expect to mostly or fully operate in the cloud. Remote work culture being the culprit of cloud computing benefits. Even so, the cloud is still relatively new, and many organizations are still dragging their feet. While staying on-premises might initially sound appealing, the advantages of moving your applications to the cloud make it a compelling choice.
Reasons to move to AWS
AWS delivers computing resources as a service, offering technology resources managed by experts and available on-demand, thus liberating companies from devoting resources to activities that don’t directly contribute to their bottom line. This allows companies to focus on the core competency of their business instead of devoting time, people, and money to IT-related projects. When using a cloud infrastructure, users can access their data anytime and anywhere on the web, without the limitations of a physical data center. They can also easily scale up or down their IT needs based on their demand, whether it be computing, data storage, content delivery, or database services, keeping their IT investment and operations lean and agile.
Before moving on to the process of migration, let’s talk about what it is and why it is needed. AWS migration is the procedure of moving data, applications, or other business components from an organization’s on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, or moving them from one cloud service to another. There are many reasons to move to the cloud and some of these are as follows:
- To handle a high volume of traffic in the website/application
- To implement and deploy the applications quickly.
- To modernize the current IT asset base
- To increase Business agility
- For Disaster recovery and security
Let’s dive deeper into some of the core benefits of AWS:
1. Enhanced Security
By 2019, data security became the most important aspect. Over the last five years, AWS’s security capabilities have grown substantially. Most organizations have started to rely on a managed service providers with a bandwidth of AWS than covering the bases with the in-house resources. Perhaps the most important benefit AWS offers organizations is a top-notch security framework.
AWS employs a shared responsibility model for data protection. They provide a globally secure infrastructure while their customers are responsible for confidentiality, integrity, and availability of their own data in the cloud. Essentially, customers are responsible for security in the cloud whereas AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud.
AWS Cloud Security is a robust solution including cutting-edge technology and well-managed processes designed to ensure even their most demanding customers’ data remains secure. But, importantly, the security framework is modular and scalable
The security offering includes:
- Network firewalls built into the virtual private cloud (VPC)
- Application firewalls to cover your virtual private network (VPN)
- TLS encryption-in-transit
- Single tenancy
- DDoS mitigation
- Encryption key management
- Server-side encryption (SSE)
- Dedicated, hardware-based cryptographic key storage
Additionally, a host of connected utilities in AWS help companies stay on top of their own security and provide support for any questions and concerns. These include:
- Inventory and configuration tools
- Monitoring and logging solutions
- Identity and access control tools
- Controls around penetration testing
- Professional support and services to fill the gaps where in-house resources fall short
AWS makes enormous investments in all aspects of security – the physical security of its server farms to maintaining secure network connections; encrypting data in rest and in transit; maintaining the strict identity and access control; securing its infrastructure through OS patching, breach simulations, and pen testing; proactively monitoring and logging all cloud activity and employing sophisticated detection tools to catch any and every cyber attack.
In short,
- By entrusting your company’s information to highly secure AWS data centers, customers can enjoy the most advanced digital security available without incurring the cost or headache of managing your own facility.
- The AWS service is scalable on every front, so if and when customer security needs evolve, the AWS framework turns to be extremely reliable.
- AWS manages dozens of compliance programs in its infrastructure, so aspects of your compliance requirements will be met at no additional cost to you.
- AWS is used by tens of thousands of customers including leading financial institutions and government agencies, so you can rest easy knowing your data is safe.
2. Improved Cost Efficiency
AWS is a lucrative option for small businesses that have high and low seasons. Having in-house hosting services requires the same amount of money regardless of how many resources are needed. With AWS you reduce your costs throughout off-peak seasons because you no longer need the resources you once did. AWS isn’t just cost-effective due to its scalability. It also has a low-cost barrier to entry. This means that even a startup can obtain some of the advantages of the cloud without it costing them thousands of dollars in startup equipment. Anyone who has built a network from the bottom up knows that servers, networking equipment, and configuration time can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Migrating to AWS equals savings on maintaining on-premises infrastructure. By virtualizing your servers and transferring data for storage to the cloud, you can retire legacy data centers and save on hardware updates.
AWS has 8 different types of data storage services at different price points:
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
- Amazon Glacier
- Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)
- Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
- Amazon EC2 Instance Storage
- AWS Storage Gateway
- AWS Snowball
- Amazon CloudFront
3. Increased Scalability and Efficiency
The ability to instantly provision resources in an AWS cloud and spin them down just as quickly not only helps IT organizations respond to opportunities quickly, but it also helps control costs. With AWS you can have a datacenter or CDN hosting your application in any geography you choose, ultimately improving speed and efficiency in the locations where your application is accessed the most. Additionally, AWS infrastructure is scalable from day one, designed to grow and shrink to meet your IT needs as they evolve.
AWS performance is unquestionably faster than the performance of internal systems. Amazon Web Service uses countless data centers across the world, enabling users who request data from the nearest geolocation to obtain the information faster than if the server had only one location.
To counter Latency issues, AWS has introduced features that decrease latency even further. For example, AWS Direct Connect allows you to directly connect your on-premises or private cloud workloads to an AWS data center, bypassing the public internet. In addition, AWS Dedicated Hosts allow you to lower latency by provisioning a physical server with EC2 instance capacity fully reserved for your use. This eliminates the “noisy neighbor” issue where a co-tenant on a server unexpectedly gobbles up bandwidth, creating lag problems for you.
4. Unbeatable Speed and Agility
Cloud Formation stack lets you provision stacks quickly so that your development teams can start working on new products without any delays due to resource provisioning. Not only does your teams’ productivity increase, but you also reduce the time-to-market for new products.
AWS customers experience:
- 37% decrease in time-to-market
- 343% increase in new code deployments
Also, if you decide to use AWS Lambda — a serverless computer service — you can speed up your development even further.
The serverless architecture enables developers to create new cloud services from functions stored in a shared repository without the need to provisioning underlying infrastructure. This makes serverless apps faster to build. Also, such apps are more cost-effective. They only consume computing resources when a certain event happens (e.g. a function gets called).
5. Higher Operational Resilience
Amazon handles data centers’ maintenance and security (so that you don’t have to). Thus, you can re-assign IT budgets (and people) towards growth-oriented and innovative projects. Thanks to instant resource provisioning and auto-scaling, businesses operating on AWS also experience fewer operational disruptions.
SME customers report:
- 57% decrease in downtime
- 39% decrease in mean time-to-restore for critical incidents
6. Elasticity & Flexibility
A traditional infrastructure requires you to predict the number of computing resources your application will use over several years. If you underestimate, your apps will not have the computing power needed to handle unexpected traffic, often resulting in customer dissatisfaction due to slow load speeds. On the flip side, if you overestimate, you are wasting money on superfluous resources. The elastic pay-what-you-use nature of the AWS allows your infrastructure to be closely aligned with demand, providing both lean and agile IT operations. Amazon EC2’s ability to instantly scale up or down instances enables you to quickly deploy new applications by allowing you to reserve as many computing resources as you need during the DevOps stage of your project.
The ability to use programming models, databases, operating systems, and architectures you are already familiar with is another advantage of AWS. Almost every AWS product and service is compatible with available coding languages, which saves time and money on hiring additional specialists. The destination for your workloads may be AWS, but what’s the fastest, safest way to get them there? Proper migration planning can help you avoid any number of missteps.
7. Compliance
In 2020, two-thirds of hospital representatives said they trusted AWS to keep their data secure. That’s because, in addition to increasingly sophisticated security measures, AWS offers compliance packages focused on the unique needs of organizations in regulated industries. Although AWS can be a compliant environment, it needs to be configured and maintained by IT professionals who understand the platform and the regulations.
In-House Hosting vs Managed Service
Hosting an application on your own servers has been compared to owning a house: you can do whatever you want with it, but you’re also responsible for all of it. Managed hosting is more like having access to rentals all over the world: you only pay for what you actually need and use (and someone else handles the maintenance).
Like owning your house, hosting your own application will quickly grow expensive. You will face setup costs over and above the servers themselves, such as an Internet connection able to handle any expected loads (and unexpected spikes) and whatever fees your internet provider may add on for providing a static IP address. With total control comes total responsibility — so if a server goes out in the middle of the night, your staff could lose a lot of sleep.
If you’re hosting your own servers, you will also need to make sure you’ve implemented resources for disaster recovery and backup to avoid the steep consequences of downtime.
The takeaway? “Homeownership,” in this case hosting your own servers, carries a fair share of risk. With that said, let’s discuss the benefits of the “rental” option: moving your website to AWS with Addteq’s Codefactori
Moving your application to AWS will take the burden off your in-house staff
Running an application from an internal server adds another to-do list for your developers. Why are certain users just can’t log in? Why do some apps have trouble running on specific configurations? IT leaders realize that their and employees’ time is better spent on strategic initiatives. So, who will handle these issues? When you move to AWS, your app will be able to run smoothly and the service provider will take responsibility and handle basic user support.
While the cloud offers many advantages, navigating the choices—such as how much of the security responsibilities you should take on—can be overwhelming. That’s where we come in. As an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, Addteq has extensive experience helping companies migrate to the AWS cloud. Working with you on a continuous basis, Addteq can help determine the services on AWS that your organization would benefit from, and architect them in a way that best suits your website.
To Conclude
AWS’s comprehensive portfolio of offerings makes it a universal contender for businesses across different verticals. With advanced security and stellar infrastructure performance, AWS can meet any scope of IT needs. All that is left for you is to complete your business case for adoption and reach out to us to help with the migration.
