- Viraj Talikotkar
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has quickly become the leader for providing multiple services to various verticals worldwide. AWS dominates the market with nearly 35% global market share — the combined competition of IT giants such as Google, Microsoft, and IBM is close to 30%. One of the main reasons for the meteoric rise is, AWS puts in much effort to ensure that customers get the best from its infrastructure.
The Well-Architected Framework is a proactive initiative by AWS to apply best practices and assess if the systems in place are working as designed. However, how would you know if you are following AWS’ best practices? For this, you will need to look at how different units in your business use AWS to handle deliverables. Collect information on AWS utilization from business units and compare it with the benchmark standards set by AWS. But, which business units do you choose to assess? Here are five key units to observe.
Operations teams are responsible for enabling and sustaining the day-to-day of the business. Working on generating continuous business value and constantly improving processes and procedures is the core function. Operations actively partake in process automation, event management, and setting standards on how businesses should run — activities critical to every organization. You will need to check if AWS assets are supporting operations teams at maximum capacity.
Cyberthreats will cost organizations $6 trillion by the end of 2021. Securing business peripheries is crucial for cybersecurity teams as cyberattacks cause financial and reputational losses, not to mention the time taken to detect a breach and the resulting downtime. Security teams monitor security-related incidents and protect information and systems from potential violations. Cybersecurity also handles data integrity, privilege management, and establishing controls. Check if AWS’ intelligent and robust security controls are assisting in securing your business.
Information Technology teams handle mission-critical functions across the organization. Key responsibilities include optimum workload performance, system design & architecture, resiliency to failures, and the efficient use of IT and computing resources. Monitoring IT teams is critical to understanding how well placed your AWS infrastructure is. It helps in delegating ideal resources to the relevant workloads, making informed decisions, and coping with ever-evolving business needs.
It is crucial to liaise with cost optimization teams to understand the cost factor of investing in AWS. Check for unnecessary costs, analyze money spend, choice, and the ideal number of AWS resources. Generate reports on spending over time and help scale as business needs grow without overspending. The factors will help in determining the perfect spending on AWS and will contribute towards a better ROI.
AWS is particular about building systems that comply with data laws. The HIPPA in the USA, the data protection law of Singapore, the GDPR of Europe, and many other laws encapsulate in the design of AWS systems. Compliance is key to safeguarding internal stakeholders and external customers. Hence, it is vital to check if established AWS systems follow all compliance rules that governments, agencies, and businesses have set. AWS already complies with a plethora of rules and regulations set by each country globally.
Your aim should be to maximize monetization and ROI from the established AWS infrastructure. All business units must be streamlined and optimized to combine and deliver excellent business outcomes. Collating data and observations and comparing them with AWS best practices is the key to generating remarkable business value.
As an AWS advanced consulting partner, we have conducted multiple Well-Architected Reviews for our clients from various industries. You can also avail AWS credits of $5,000 when the reviews and remediation are complete through a certified partner. During the review process, our certified experts will review your AWS architecture in four simple steps. Through the review session, we will understand the details about your workloads and check for their compliance with the AWS Well-Architected Framework. The review process is concluded with the sharing of our findings categorized into high, medium, and no risk in your AWS infrastructure, along with our recommendations for remediating the identified risks.
So don’t wait any longer and schedule your free AWS Well-Architected Review today.
