If you’re looking for something to transform your business and your IT strategy, you might consider Amazon Web Services or AWS. Amazon Web Services is a cloud platform that you’ve likely heard at least a bit about because it’s a massive component of their business portfolio.
According to Investopedia, in the second quarter of 2021, AWS brought in $14.8 billion in net sales—a record. That accounted for more than 13% of Amazon’s total net sales.
AWS is poised to lead the way in terms of all other cloud computing platforms, including its main competitor, Microsoft Azure.
AWS is a solution for servers, networking, remote computing, security, and mobile development.
With that in mind, the following are some of the business uses and implications of AWS to be aware of in 2022.
What Is AWS?
If you aren’t sure what AWS is exactly, it’s made up of many different cloud computing products and services. We can divide AWS into three main products—EC2, which is a virtual machine service, Glacier, a low-cost cloud storage service, and S3, which is Amazon’s storage center.
There are 81 availability zones where AWS servers are located. The regions are divided to put geographical restrictions on their services if they want. This is also done to promote security because the data locations are diversified.
Moving to the Cloud
Jeff Bezos compares AWS to the utility companies of the 1900s. He said that a hundred years ago, if a factory needed electricity, it would build a power plant. However, once factories could purchase their needed electricity for a public utility, the need for expensive private electric plants went down.
Currently, the goal of Amazon with AWS is to move companies into the cloud and away from physical computing.
Before the cloud, if a business needed a lot of storage, they would build a physical space and then maintain it.
Computing power presented a similar situation. Companies experiencing surge traffic would have to buy a lot of power to support their business during peak times, but they’d still be paying for that computing power during their slower times.
With AWS and the cloud in general, businesses pay for what they’re using.
Businesses use AWS as a way to rethink their IT infrastructure. As a business, when you rely on AWS, you can focus more on strategy and the creation of value rather than building out a traditional IT infrastructure.
You get the advantage of end-to-end, seamless IT solutions.
What Are the Benefits?
AWS’s cost, as mentioned, is based on what a customer is actually using. This gives small businesses and startups the ability to access enterprise-level resources for a cost that’s affordable to them. AWS is ideal for a company that’s in the early stages because it gives all the tools you need to start in the cloud.
If you’re an existing company, there are low-cost migration services that allow your infrastructure to move to Amazon Web Services.
As you might imagine, AWS creates scalability, security, and reliability for users based on the concept of paying for what you’re using.
The use of Amazon Web Services is significantly more secure than hosting your own storage or website. The dozens of data centers strategically located around the world are always monitored and rigorously maintained in a way that you wouldn’t be able to do yourself.
The diversification of the data centers also offers a high level of protection.
There are more than 100 tools available from AWS, which you can use separately depending on your needs. You don’t have to invest much money upfront in setting up servers in advance. You may find that you don’t use all of the tools you initially think you will, so you can easily eliminate those.
Along with the general security afforded by AWS, you can customize your infrastructure security with specific access given to each user. You can also track user changes, and some data experts can help you and provide troubleshooting 24/7.
Using new tools and services can be frustrating and hinder productivity when they aren’t user-friendly, but this typically isn’t a concern with AWS. AWS is flexible in its use, and team members can choose the operating system or programming language they prefer.
Overall, for IT departments of businesses of all sizes, AWS does represent great opportunities as part of true digital transformation and a shift to a cloud infrastructure.
