Amazon Web Services has evolved beyond being just a cloud platform for websites and web applications. A broad range of services which AWS provides today can be put to use either individually or collectively to solve unique business problems. Business critical apps need to be scalable, responsive and highly available, and organizations are always on the lookout for cost effective solutions. Reliable data protection and business continuity solutions are still tricky, expensive problems to solve. But organizations are also looking to add mobile apps, stream digital media and even gamify business processes. As mainstream business begins to leverage a global workforce with a work anywhere culture, providing low latency, regional access to all of these resources is important to ensure a consistent user experience.
AWS Use Cases
Business Critical Apps, Collaboration, Regional Access
Organizations continue to demand high availability for business critical applications. It’s not always possible to match expectation with budget, as provisioning costs can often be beyond the reach of most. High availability usually requires replicating most costs and components of the existing systems. Adding regional high availability usually requires global clustering and load balancing solutions of which entry costs are outside that possible of most IT budgets.
AWS can be leveraged to run business critical applications. Depending on the architecture, these could even be clustered across global regions such as the East and West coast of North America, or the west coast and the Asia Pacific region. Applications can serve users within their regions cutting reponse times and boosting productivity. This capability eliminates the need for secondary regional data centers or even a secondary sites.
Data Backup, Pilot Light Disaster Recovery, Data Archival
Traditional backup & disaster recovery requires investment in on-premises storage and backup media which must grow as demand on storage grows. Add regulatory requirements for archival, and backup storage demands escalate rapidly. Some form of offsite storage strategy must be added which includes the logistics of media handling. AWS can help immensely with these costs by offering unlimited offsite storage tiers. This storage can be added to indefinitely, and only storage that is consumed is paid for. Add a very low cost data archival solution, and demands on local storage diminish.
For continuity, business critical app servers can remain in a powered down until required. In this state they incur very little cost, placing an effective, reliable pilot light DR strategy within reach of most business. In the event of a disaster, all systems and data can be recovered within the cloud environment very quickly, and users will have access no matter where they are.
Mobile Apps, Secure Access, Micro Applications
Mobility is quickly becoming a requirement as business seeks to compete, adapt to disruption and stay abreast of mobile trends. Leveraging AWS offers several advantages to help rapidly execute a mobility strategy. The mobile application development platform allows enterprise to develop mobile applications without requiring the supporting systems and infrastructure. Micro-applications can be quickly developed, securely interfacing with on-premises systems and data, yet still abstracted from core business systems, available online and able to scale globally. Business data can be truly accessed from anywhere, with very low latency, from mobile devices without sacrificing data security.
Digital Media, Video, Virtual Reality
Use of digital media for marketing is exponentially increasing demand on storage, bandwidth and compute resources. Moving Digital Media processing to the cloud helps to offset these costs, deliver low latency/high bandwidth streams, and temper the demands of storing digital on costly, on-premises storage. Raw Media can be shared between production resources no matter where they are located. Media can also be transcoded and post-processed in the cloud, and rendered rapidly with on-demand access to parallel computing at a fraction of the cost. Finished product can be served or streamed globally with low latency, via a content delivery network and stored cheaply.
Mobile/PC Games
Games are not just adopted in the entertainment sector. Marketing, products or processes can be gamified to encourage customers to increase engagement and maintain contact. Gamified business processes can drive employee engagement and boost performance. AWS offers full application development SDK’s for mobile devices, accelerating development, and cutting time to launch. Push messaging is used to keep customers informed of real-time of events, or reach out based on location maintains continuous contact. Identities can be federated across all platforms. Gaming media assets such as images, video or 3D worlds can be stored and served at high speeds, will scale globally, while costing very little to serve and store.
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See specific examples of how leveraging AWS can reduce the total cost of ownership over three years when compared to the same co-located solution. The cost reductions are significant enough to bring these solutions into reach of most IT budgets.
