Ericsson is one of many companies that has benefitted from the use of Amazon Web Services. The company a provider of services and technology to various telecom operations is one of the world’s leaders in its field (AWS Case Study: Ericsson, 2013). By working to understand cloud computing and the benefits that cloud services, and Amazon Web Services in particular, have to offer it is possible to see not only the reasons why Ericsson opted to use Amazon Web Services, but how they were able to benefit on a large scale from its use.
Of the many benefits offered by cloud computing, perhaps some of the most important are cost reduction, automated software updates, remote access, and on-demand availability. Not only does AWS provide its customers “on-demand access to a wide range of cloud infrastructure services” but they only charge those businesses for the resources that are used; companies are not required to pay for those services that they do not need, want, or use (AWS Economics Center, 2013). This decrease in cost works to save businesses money when compared with other solutions, solutions whose features they must pay for in full, regardless of whether or not they use them. In addition, all software offered by Amazon Web Services are automatically updated free of charge, working to further decrease the costs to their consumers. As an additional benefit, the cloud may be accessed from anywhere, on any machine or device, as long as that device has an internet connection which supports its access.
Use your promo and get a custom paper on
"Amazon Web Services: Cloud Computing".
As an additional bonus, Amazon Web Services are fully scalable; because businesses are only responsible for paying for the resources that they use the size of the business does not matter and any company, large or small, may benefit from and utilize AWS (AWS Economic Center, 2013). Furthermore, AWS offers guaranteed uptime, something almost unheard of for server support, whether it be traditional or cloud based; their guarantee is for 99.9% uptime (Wired: New From Amazon: Guaranteed Server Uptime, 2013). All three of Amazon’s cloud options, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Services (Amazon S3), and RightScale offer the same levels of customization, reliability, uptime, and resource usage, with the packages themselves being the only difference, one more aspect of the customization for businesses large or small.
In spite of how great cloud services and cloud computing appears to be, as every cloud has a silver lining, so too does every cloud bring with it some rain. There are many different security threats to the use of cloud computing, of those, the top nine include data breaches, data loss, account or service traffic hijacking, insecure interfaces, denial of service attacks, malicious insiders, cloud abuse, insufficient due diligence, and technology vulnerabilities (Samson, 2013). The method by which to address most of these issues is password strength. Data breaches, data loss, account or service traffic hijacking, and insecure interfaces may all be addressed by working to make sure that all passwords are strong, that passwords are not shared with anyone else, and that efforts are taken in order to ensure that no unauthorized users gain access to those passwords. Denial of service attacks are addressed through Amazon directly, where, as a part of their up-time guarantee, server protocols are in place in order to mitigate these attacks. Malicious insiders may only be addressed by the company itself, and it is the responsibility of the company to thoroughly vet all their employees, ensuring that there is no conflict of interest and no malicious activity present on the part of their staff. Finally, insufficient due diligence means that the company opting to use the services is not fully up to date on the process of using cloud services or does not understand cloud services fully which results in user error on the part of its employees, causing potential security issues, loss of data, and the like.
Even though Amazon Web Services offers scalability, reliability, and economy as a part of their cloud platform, not all cloud platforms are the same, and there will be issues in each of these three areas as a result. Perhaps the cloud provider only offers certain plans that require users to pay for all features, regardless of use. The cloud provider may not offer an uptime guarantee, or even if they do, the provider’s servers may still go down frequently. Both of these scenarios could result in cost inflation as opposed to cost reduction. How then should a company work to overcome these issues? There is only one way to work to resolve all three of these issues potentially faced by corporations and that is to do their homework.
If a company opts to use cloud computing and cloud services as opposed to the more traditional server methods, those individuals must research all cloud services that appear to be a good fit for their business. They should look at all of the software options provided as a part of those cloud services, their uptime guarantees, their scalability, both in terms of the current size of the business and in providing the business room to grow, and they should look at the different features offered in conjunction with the pricing for those plans in order to narrow their choices down even further. Once the choices are narrowed down, it is likely that the organization will have Amazon Web Services on their list. The company should then look at the reviews for each of the different corporations, the ease of accessing their support, and the hours in which their support is available. It is highly likely that the business, like Ericsson before them, will opt for the use of Amazon Web Services as their best fitting option.
By working to understand how cloud computing providers operate and the different options available to businesses in regards to cloud platforms, it will be possible for the business to make the best fit decision for their business. It is the belief of this writer that they will select Amazon Web Services, as thousands have done before them.
- AWS case study: Ericsson. (2013). Retrieved from http://aws.amazon.com/
- AWS economics center. (2013). Retrieved from http://aws.amazon.com/economics/
- Samson, T. (2013, February 25). 9 top threats to cloud computing security. Retrieved from http://www.infoworld.com/
- Wired: New from amazon. (2013). Retrieved from http://aws.amazon.com
