The development of IT has transformed the way organizations do business, enabling businesses to connect with their customers in many new ways, cost-effectively and efficiently.
In particular, Amazon Web Services (AWS) are one of the leading cloud providers that help businesses to adapt to a world of increasing competition and changing consumer demands. Specifically, AWS helps to drive business value in various ways, including increasing flexibility and mobility, scaling with business growth and reducing costs.
Flexibility and mobility
One of the main advantages of cloud computing at large is the flexibility to work from any location, at any time.
Employees can gain access to work documents through the cloud on various devices and work on them wherever they may be located. Employees can also coordinate better on projects, as they can share documents with one another in the cloud.
Moreover, the scale AWS is able to achieve with huge number of servers provides you with enough capacity to respond to any hardware needs you may have in the future. For example, if you’re about to enter into a period of testing and development or expect to see a significant rise in traffic, with AWS you can simply spin up news servers On-Demand to handle your needs.
Scaling with business growth
An important benefit of AWS for businesses is its ability to grow with your organisation. AWS’ scalability means that you can provision as many or as few servers as you need.
So for start-ups, you may begin with a few servers but as time goes by and your business grows, you can provision as many servers as you need from AWS.
And for larger business, if you decide to expand your business overseas and require servers closer to your market, AWS’ global infrastructure is able to cater for your needs. AWS operate 32 availability zones around the globe housing numerous data centres, enabling you to host your applications on servers around the world and provide a speedy service to your customers, with low latency.
So with AWS, you can adapt your cloud computing strategy to ensure your business grows.
Reducing costs
Lowering costs is a common objective for most organizations, but finding ways to do this can be quite difficult.
But AWS offers a number of options to help you to reduce your business costs, including offering Reserved Instances (RI). With RI’s, you reserve EC2 capacity for 1 or 3 years, allowing you to gain cost-savings of up to 75% compared to On-Demand instances.
With RI’s, you can either pay the entire fee upfront, pay partially upfront and pay the remainder in monthly instalments, or pay entirely in monthly instalments. With each of these pricing models, you are able to achieve a lower effective cost-per hour of provisioning servers compared to On-Demand instances, ultimately helping you to achieve lower costs.
Ultimately, AWS is able to drive value for businesses through increased flexibility and mobility with access to files, scaling up or down in relation to your business needs and reducing costs.