Benefits of Cloud Computing with AWS

With technological change happening at a faster pace than at any time before, digital transformation leveraging cloud computing is key to maintaining a competitive edge.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) can help your business thrive. AWS is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. Offering over 175 fully-featured cloud services from data centers around the globe, organizations from large enterprises and governmental agencies to fast-growing startups, have easy access to IT services like processing, networking, storage, security and more. AWS helps them lower costs, become more agile and innovate faster to scale and grow. 

AWS is commonly used for:

• Storing large amounts of data
• Processing large datasets 
• Handling peak loads for e-commerce websites
• Hosting static websites
• Hosting dynamic applications or websites with web, application and database tiers
• And so much more

A 2018 IDC white paper titled, “Fostering Business and Organizational Transformation to Generate Business Value with Amazon Web Services” reveals AWS not only lowers the cost of providing IT services but changes how IT services are delivered and helps transform business operations so companies can better compete and address market needs and demands.

IDC survey participants indicated that their AWS migration created substantial business benefits, including: 

• 51% lower cost of operations 
• 62% more efficient IT infrastructure staff 
• 94% less unplanned downtime 
• 25% higher developer productivity 
• Three times more new features delivered annually
• $36.5 million per year of additional revenue 
• Six months to payback 
• 637% five-year ROI

These benefits were achieved by: 

Freeing Up Financial and IT Resources - AWS creates more cost-effective IT environments by optimizing computing, storage and database costs, scaling to meet business demand without overprovisioning. Cost and human capital efficiencies were also achieved by moving away from dedicated, in-house infrastructure operations. Participants were able to shift the focus of their IT staffs to more higher-level activities and strategic business initiatives, rather than day-to-day routine support. They also realized substantial gains in application developer productivity with AWS.

Increasing Speed and Agility - Offering reliable and high-performing AWS applications leads to operational efficiencies via increased user productivity and fewer business disruptions. Gaining the agility to deliver cost-effective IT resources on an on-demand basis enabled participants to address business opportunities quickly to win more business and increase revenues.

Reducing Business Risk - AWS increases confidence in the security and resiliency of IT operations, with measurable positive impacts on business risk related to availability, security and regulatory compliance:

• Ease of deploying clusters ensures performance with additional resources 
• Reliable failover services maximize availability while diminishing outage impacts
• Automated scaling prevents performance issues 
• Multizone workload balancing capabilities distributes traffic more efficiently while increasing resiliency and reducing latency
• Compliance with industry-specific regulations and mandates avoids noncompliance fines, penalties, and reputational damage

Some additional benefits of AWS, beyond what’s listed above, include: 

• Better security options 
• Increased productivity through automation 
• New revenue streams through differentiated solutions 
• Higher availability leading to improved user satisfaction 
• Rapid experimentation and transformation in response to business changes and needs 
• Faster innovation and time to market 
• Reduced costs with better performance 
• Open standards eliminate getting locked into one vendor 

The Bottom Line: Organizations adopting AWS can be more competitive, increase customer satisfaction, innovate faster, achieve greater productivity, enhance security, improve reliability and optimize costs.