Introduction to Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, which offers services from data centers all around the world.

As of 2020, around 50 percent of all corporate data is stored in the cloud. The amount of data stored in the cloud has increased by 20 percent in the past 5 years, and that percentage is exponentially increasing every day as companies seek improvements in security, reliability, and cost of their organization’s resources. If you work in the IT industry, you have most likely heard of Amazon’s cloud platform known as Amazon Web Services, or AWS. However, you might be wondering what it is, what you can use it for and how it can help your organization.

AWS’s core infrastructure is built to satisfy security requirements for all industries including the government, global banking, and other highly sensitive industries. AWS supports 90 different security standards and compliance certifications, and is backed by a deep set of cloud security tools. AWS offers a pay as you go approach for pricing, which makes testing the waters or scaling your organization’s resources easy and affordable.

AWS offers 200 fully featured services to cover everything from simple data storage (Amazon S3), to commanding and controlling satellites (AWS Ground Station). Although controlling satellites is not the most frequently used among everyday organizations, it goes to show that the abilities of AWS are massive. Some of the more commonly used services, from my experience, such as Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, and DynamoDB, give organizations the ability to remove the need for on-prem servers, increase reliability and security of their resources, while decreasing costs of storage and compute power.

On average, migrating your organizations’ infrastructure to AWS has an infrastructure cost savings of 31%. Also, migrating reduces unplanned downtime of organizational resources by 69%, while reporting 43% fewer security incidents per year. AWS has endless knowledge-based articles for helping with almost any problem you encounter while using their services. They have designed services specifically for migration to the cloud, and offer solutions to migrate any workload such as applications, websites, databases, storage, physical and virtual servers or even entire data centers.

Organizations of every type, size, and industry are using AWS for a wide variety of use cases. Cloud computing is the future of computing, and the benefits are undeniable. From the elasticity of resources, to being able to deploy globally in minutes.

This blog entry is the first in a series we will be posting on the topic of Amazon Web services. We will be detailing different use cases for a number of Amazon Web Services, types of cloud computing, migration tutorials, web application hosting, and others.

Does your company have the right cybersecurity plan in place? Contact us for more information on how our customizable services may help protect your business.

Posted by Bryan Cowing