The importance of cloud technologies hardly needs an introduction. The pandemic delivered an accelerated push toward the cloud, washing away any resistance of companies that have been hesitating to shift their mission-critical workloads away from on-premises.
The worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 23.1% in 2021 to a total of US$332.3 billion, up from US$270 billion in 2020. With over 90% of enterprises already leveraging cloud technologies in one way or the other, the cloud has now become an integral component of IT modernization that is key to enabling the digital transformation of companies large and small.
But moving to the cloud – especially at scale – is a complex endeavor that requires companies to build new capabilities, and ensures that the right people, processes, and tools are in place to support the transition.
Gartner’s “2021-2023 Emerging Technology Roadmap”, which is based on surveys of 437 global firms, found that executives see talent shortage as the largest barrier to deploying emerging technologies. These are mostly cloud-based technologies such as databases, machine learning, advanced storage, and analytics.
In order to take full advantage of what the cloud can do, companies have to reorganize their operations right from the planning stage of their migration process. In particular, for large enterprises with complex IT architectures, moving applications and data to cloud platforms involves working through a formidable set of technology, security, operational, and financial issues.
For organizations moving to the AWS cloud, Cloud Comrade can provide the expertise, guidance, and services to help them build a resilient and high-performing infrastructure for their applications and workloads with AWS Managed Services (AMS). By optimizing your cloud environment based on your key business goals, AMS can deliver greater cost savings and operational efficiency on the cloud, while enhancing security, compliance, and risk optimization.
Best practices designed to help you succeed in the cloud
AMS leverages the architectural best practices from the AWS Well-Architected Framework, which are designed to help organizations better understand the pros and cons of decisions they make while moving to the cloud.
The framework is based on five pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimization. It provides a consistent approach for customers and partners to evaluate architectures, and implement designs that can scale over time.
- Operational Excellence refers to the ability to support the development and run workloads effectively, gain insight into their operations, and continuously improve supporting processes and procedures to deliver business value.
- The Security pillar describes how to take advantage of cloud technologies to protect data, systems, and assets in a way that can improve the security posture of an organization.
- The Reliability pillar encompasses the ability of a workload to perform its intended function correctly and consistently when it is expected to. This includes the ability to operate and test the workload through its total lifecycle.
- Performance Efficiency is the ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.
- Cost Optimization is the ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point.
Organizations can also use the AWS Well-Architected Review (which includes questions around the AWS Well-Architected Framework) to ensure that their AWS workloads are following these best practices. The AWS Well-Architected Tool uses questions help enterprises to review the state of their workloads and compare them to the latest AWS architectural best practices. They can then use this information to create training plans or centralized governance solutions.
Cloud is a journey, not a destination
With AMS, Cloud Comrade helps companies better reduce costs, secure data, and optimize risks, while freeing up the IT teams to focus resources on higher-value functions.
Based on the comprehensive set of best practices in the AWS Well-Architected Framework, AMS can enable organizations to build effective cloud infrastructures that scale overtime to meet their changing needs as they transform and scale. It will also incrementally support all the latest innovations from AWS, allowing businesses to leverage the newest and most advanced capabilities to stay ahead of the technology curve.
