Cloud Computing – While it’s one of the latest buzzword to impress in a group, there are significant advantages in cost, efficiency and reliability in moving to the cloud. The top three major providers for Cloud infrastructure and services – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Rackspace are providing compelling reasons to make Cloud Computing an essential strategy for any business. Amazon is leading the pack with very attractive pricing and service features. So, let’s take a quick dig at the AWS.
Money, Money, Money
It’s always the root cause, and the objective. The AWS offers three major offerings – Processing Power, Memory and Storage. These services are inexpensive and offer a wide variety of combinations to keep the cost low. There are a slew of other services also.
The Processing Power can be rented for the latest and most powerful hardware and software that is available in the market. The Elastic Compute Cloud EC2 instance rents from a penny to 50 cents per hour usage. The choices of Spot, Reserved and Dedicated instances offer a lot of choices to manage rental expenses effectively. The Storage can be rented for a few cents per gigabyte. There is choice to rent storage for archival or for fast retrieval.
Renting these services from AWS means that a business avoids capital expenses and uses the money instead for operational expenses. The capital conserved can be used towards more important business needs. The resources are saved in obtaining capital outlays approvals, acquiring hardware and software, maintaining and running systems.
Will they come and when? – Too much vs too little
Despite advances in the Predictive Analysis there are challenges in guessing consumer behavior. Will a product be a hit with the consumers? Will the consumers come in droves? When will they buy? Will the ordering system handle the deluge of orders?
Handling unpredictable situations in a business can lead to overspend or underspend on the hardware, software, network and other resources. Overspending means paying for resources sitting idle. Underspending means lost business opportunity. The demand and supply graphs rarely align.
AWS offers the Elastic Capacity. The resources – hardware, software, storage, processing power, all can be architected to move up or down based on need dynamics. And the resources can be added or removed on an hourly, daily, on demand or seasonal patterns leading to themost optimal usage.
The biggest benefit AWS elasticity offers is the PayGo model. The business pays for what it uses and not for the idling resources. The various auto scaling features of AWS make this resource availability possible.
It’s handled
On premises resources require care and maintenance. The data has to be backed regularly. The applications have to be recycled. The software has to be upgraded. The physical access to critical areas has to be controlled. The network has to be secured. The capacity has to be planned and upgraded and so on.
With AWS all these tasks are outsourced and automated. There is nothing on site that the business needs to manage in terms of hardware or software resources. There is auto redundancy built into every system by design. Once the systems have been provisioned, the upgrades, backups, security is all handled. And handled at reliability levels that far exceed the on-premises systems. The business continuity is ensured.
So, time to head to the beach?
So, with everything handled as a business owner you can head to the beach. Just kidding.
The business needs expertise to architect and provision the business services to the Amazon Cloud and operate it. While there are no silver bullets, AWS takes a big load off from the business in terms of cost and resources that would otherwise be spent on premises.
And the biggest benefit AWS provides is releasing the time and money for business to do what is does best – mind its business.
