Accelerate AWS Success with Managed Services

Amazon Web Services is changing the way that organizations conduct business. According to Gartner, Amazon Web Services was ranked first among the leading Infrastructure as a Service providers. With this glowing assessment, it's no wonder that enterprises running AWS are already experiencing the benefits of adopting this cloud solution.

Once an organization realizes the myriad of benefits that AWS can provide, they likely will become interested in accelerating their AWS deployment. However, its critical that organizations understand key challenges with AWS – as well as how to overcome them.

Before organizations attempt to implement AWS, it’s important to understand which challenges can cause bumps on your migration roadmap. Here are five key challenges that organizations must seek to overcome:

Lack of In-House Expertise

Amazon Web Services doesn’t just have a learning curve – it has a learning cliff. As a result, many IT departments without a sizeable amount of exposure to AWS will have significant issues wrapping their minds around this highly configurable, feature-rich cloud.

This doesn’t just mean that IT teams will struggle to optimally configure your organization’s cloud deployment. It also means that your organization may spend a significant amount of time and money on support from Amazon’s experts. Over time, this can take a significant toll on an organization, both operationally and financially.

Security and Compliance

When transferring data from on-premises to the cloud, it’s common for stakeholders to be concerned with security risks and licensing compliance. Due to AWS being a public cloud, IT teams will be under additional pressure to ensure that all data is controlled. After all, the more cloud resources that an organization has, the higher their risk of a data breach.

While AWS has had no controversies involving sensitive data, organizations are still justified in their trepidation. If a breach compromises any sensitive data, organizations can be subject to sizeable fines due to data protection laws. As a result, any advocates of launching an AWS solution must be ready to remedy these woes.

Getting Alignment

The success of an AWS adoption initiative strongly relies on the opinions and acceptance of business users. After all, a fundamental change in your organization’s IT infrastructure often requires alterations to teams, processes, and cultures.

This means that it’s important to fully understand the benefits and business implications of AWS before the deployment process begins. Once you have this foundational knowledge, then it’s necessary to demonstrate the value of AWS to every team that will interact with the cloud solution. Otherwise, members of your organization may find the complexity of AWS too intimidating to fully harness.

Migration and Performance

To get the right quality, reliability and performance from an AWS deployment, organizations must ensure that their cloud migration is as seamless as possible. Before the migration process begins, ensure that your organization has accounted for every feature, and third-party app that will be utilized on the cloud. 

This is especially true for legacy systems. They are often a key part of business-critical operations, and their migration process is extremely complicated due to their age and complexity. Before beginning to move these programs, organizations must define an immediate, long-term solution that can accommodate them.

Controlling Expenses

Predicting and controlling the expenses of an AWS migration is arguably the most difficult part of the process. Since AWS utilizes a scalable pricing structure, an organization’s total expense will rely on how many services are being hosted, and how many users are using AWS. While this is great for start-ups and newcomers to the cloud, the size and expense of a cloud deployment can quickly spiral out of control.

While Amazon Web Services offers a wide variety of benefits, overcoming AWS-related challenges can be taxing and time consuming. Simplifying this migration process from the very beginning can help your organization reap the rewards of AWS much quicker. To accelerate the introduction of your AWS deployment, consider leveraging a managed services partner.

Simple for AWS

By leveraging Simple for AWS, your organization will have access to a streamlined service offering that will help innovate faster. Here are just a couple of benefits that Simple for AWS provides:

• Technical Support – Simple for AWS offers 24/7 support every day of the year via SoftwareONE’s Global Service Delivery Center, giving organizations constant access to AWS experts and administrators. This will negate any costs of contacting Amazon’s in-house support.
• Automated and Consolidated Billing – With Simple for AWS, organizations will experience instant cost savings by consolidating multiple end-user accounts. In addition to this, organizations will receive detailed invoicing of spend by business unit, location, or cost center.

PyraCloud

Managing a complicated cloud deployment for your organization can cause a variety of unexpected snags. This is why a cloud management platform like PyraCloud is absolutely invaluable when using AWS.

• Spend Management – As a transparent end-to-end offering, PyraCloud allows customers to govern, control costs, and optimize resources within their business units, applications, and projects.

• Govern Contracts – When migrating applications and sensitive data to the cloud, ensuring compliance is paramount. With PyraCloud, organizations can discover, normalize, and govern their software contracts while establishing a concrete pricing and procurement process.
• Procure Effectively – PyraCloud allows visibility into entitlements, inventory, and consumption. This helps organizations optimize their software renewals, while keeping them prepared for publisher audits.

BackupSimple

As your AWS deployment expands, the data within it will become increasingly critical to your organization’s day-to-day life. While this data becomes more significant, its complexity will increase exponentially. For this reason, its vital to safeguard your data in a centralized manner to prevent catastrophe.

• Highly Secure – BackupSimple processes data in a way that puts security first. All data is de-duped, compressed, and encrypted both in transit and at rest. 
• Consistent Availability – All data management is executed from a resilient web portal that is hosted by SoftwareONE. Not only that, but data backups can be made from anywhere, anytime, in a user-friendly way.

By using managed services, organizations can leverage the assistance of experts to overcome cloud-related challenges. Ultimately, this will allow your organization to reap the benefits of AWS at an earlier point in time.