How an AWS Managed Service Provider Can Solve These 3 Business Pain Points

Amazon Web Services has held the top spot in the cloud industry for years. RightScale’s 2017 State of the Cloud report found that 57 percent of businesses have adopted AWS for their cloud needs, beating out both Azure and Google.

But AWS technology comes with its share of challenges for a company wanting to leverage it, from initial configuration to rare but damaging service outages (no human technology is flawless) and inevitable scalability needs as businesses grow. Here are a few key ways a managed service provider can alleviate these common cloud pain points.

1) Challenges with Initial Setup and Integration

It’s easy to view the cloud as the silver bullet for fearsome infrastructure obstacles. While there is some truth to that statement (make no mistake, the hype is real), often, the first obstacle emerges in the cloud’s initial setup, which, if not done properly,  can lead to additional struggles with ongoing use – not to mention missing out on the full potential of the cloud.

75% of business workloads are now supported by the cloud.

RightScale found that a lack of resources and expertise is still the number one challenge when it comes implementing the cloud. While an in-house IT team might have a considerable skillset, there’s a good chance that they aren’t able to master every AWS service and know how to best tune them to suit their company’s business needs. Without the requisite knowledge, good luck trying to integrate other applications into the cloud environment or attempt to use all of AWS’s 40+ services.

Leveraging a managed service provider can be key to configuring the right AWS environment and related services.

2) Website Performance and Uptime Issues

For most organizations, their website represents the public face of the business and the first impression for potential customers. To avoid missing crucial business opportunities, it’s imperative to avoid performance issues like outages due to high visitor traffic, poor latency, and slow page loading. AWS certainly comes with an array of benefits, but it isn’t free of performance-robbing factors that can impact visitor experience.

This is another area in which a managed service partner can be quite helpful. In addition to optimizing the AWS environment for the site’s content, they can make proactive recommendations as to when to scale resources up or down. In this way, periods of peak website traffic can be planned for ahead of time, alongside keeping the website up.

3) Heightened Security

According to RightScale’s report, while security is no longer the number one worry with cloud environments, it is still a major concern. DDoS attacks, for one, have grown at a significant pace, with websites experiencing an average of 124,000 DDoS attacks every week during an 18-month period across 2015 and 2016, as well as a 75 percent increase in attack size during the first half of 2016. These attacks are becoming more and more common across every industry, and, although AWS environments offer robust security measures, it’s best to create safeguards that are optimized to align with any given cloud environment.

A managed service provider can preventively take additional security measures to ensure that no cyber attacks cyber attack will topple a website or impact sensitive data housed in the environment, thus for an extra dose of peace of mind