Amazon Web Services: Everything You Need to Know

Last updated: December 2023

If you’re interested in migrating your business to the cloud, or if you want help making the most of AWS features for your company, contact Opti9 today. We are experts in helping clients migrate their workloads and applications to the cloud through our custom migration services.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally. AWS services are trusted by the largest enterprises and the hottest start-ups to power various workloads, including web and mobile applications, game development, data processing and warehousing, storage, archive, and many others.

Amazon Web Services offers reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services and is trusted by the largest enterprises and the hottest start-ups to power a wide variety of workloads, including:

• web and mobile applications
• game development
• data processing
• warehousing
• storage
• archive
• and many others

AWS has significantly more services and more features within those services than any other cloud provider. This makes it faster, easier, and more cost-effective to move your existing applications to the cloud and build nearly anything you can imagine.

As an AWS customer, you will benefit from AWS data centers and a network architected to protect your information, identities, applications, and devices. With AWS and our comprehensive services and features, you can improve your ability to meet core security and compliance requirements, such as data locality, protection, and confidentiality.

Get More Info: Opti9 Achieves AWS Service Delivery Designation

AWS allows you to automate manual security tasks to shift your focus to scaling and innovating your business. AWS provides a set of flexible services that enable organizations to start small and scale their compute capacity, storage requirements, and application functionality as their business needs change. Additionally, AWS supports the widest range of operating systems, programming languages, and tools that helps developers be productive when building applications for the cloud.

In addition to these benefits for developers, businesses can also take advantage of the pay-as-you-go model for consuming IT resources which helps them save money as they no longer need to invest in upfront infrastructure costs or overprovision for peak demand.

AWS provides the control and confidence you need to securely run your business with the most flexible and secure cloud computing environment available today. As an AWS customer, you will benefit from AWS data centers and a network architected to protect your information, identities, applications, and devices.

With AWS, you can improve your ability to meet core security and compliance requirements, such as data locality, protection, and confidentiality with our comprehensive services and features. As a leading provider of cloud services, AWS and its network of trusted partners, including Opti9, are constantly innovating to provide the most secure environment for our customers. With AWS, you can be confident that your data is safe and accessible when you need it.

The key components of AWS are Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), Glacier storage service, DynamoDB database service, Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon Route53.

These services can be used together or independently to support a wide range of use cases such as web and application hosting, storage, backup and recovery, Big Data analysis, IoT deployment and operations, mobile applications development and deployment, gaming applications development and streaming, and media transcoding and distribution.

READ: Opti9 Recertified as AWS Advanced Consulting Partner

Your organization is unique. Its specific needs, culture, structures, and goals make it the successful enterprise it is today. When you’re ready to take your business to the next level with AWS, you need a partner who understands your business and can help you navigate the many options available in the cloud. Opti9 is that partner.

We are an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with over a decade of experience helping organizations like yours migrate to AWS, power their DevOps with AWS, and move their Microsoft workloads to the cloud. We understand the challenges and opportunities of migrating to AWS, and we have the expertise to help you make the most of AWS for your organization.

• 90% of companies are on the cloud.
• Amazon Web Services is the leading cloud vendor with a 32% share.
• Cloud infrastructure spending surpassed $80 billion in 2018. (Source)
• The average business runs 38% of workloads in public and 41% in private cloud. (Source)
• 85% of enterprises keep sensitive data in the cloud. (Source)
• Professional services account for 12.2% of global cloud spending. (Source)
• About a third of companies’ IT budget goes for cloud services. (Source)
• The United States Accounts for Over 50% of Public Cloud Services Spending (Source)
• As much as two-thirds of businesses and enterprises view cloud security as the biggest impediment to adoption. (Source)
• Almost half of businesses (49%) don’t have their cloud databases encrypted, leaving their info vulnerable. (Source)

• The global cloud computing market is expected to reach $623.3 billion by 2023. (Source)
• Providing access to data from anywhere is the main reason for cloud adoption. (Source)
• Cloud computing spending is expected to grow at better than 6x the rate of IT spending (Source)
• Cost optimization is the primary reason for 47% of enterprises’ cloud migration. (Source)
• More than $1.3 TRILLION in IT spending will be affected by the shift to the cloud this year. (Source)
• Gartner predicts that by 2025, 99% of failures in cloud security will be due to customers’ fault (Source)

AWS provides the control and confidence you need to securely run your business with the most flexible and secure cloud computing environment available today. As an AWS customer, you will benefit from AWS data centers and a network architected to protect your: 

• Information
• Identities
• Applications
• Devices 

With AWS, you can improve your ability to meet core security and compliance requirements, such as: 

• Data locality
• Data protection
• Confidentiality 

With AWS, you can be confident that your data is safe and accessible when you need it.

Case Studies: Cloud Storage Solutions with Opti9

As your business grows, it becomes increasingly important to scale your IT infrastructure in a way that is both secure and efficient. With AWS, you can do just that. AWS provides superior visibility and control over your data, so you can rest assured knowing that your information is always safe. Additionally, with continuous monitoring for near real-time security information, you can be confident that your resources are always properly protected. This way, you can focus on running your business, safe in the knowledge that your IT infrastructure is in good hands.

AWS helps you reduce human configuration errors and free up your team to focus on other work. With a wide variety of deeply integrated solutions, you can automate tasks in novel ways, making it easier for your security team to work closely with developers and operations teams. This way, you can create and deploy code faster and more securely. 

AWS is constantly innovating to ensure that your data is protected against the latest threats. In addition to physical security, AWS employs a variety of technical mechanisms to keep your data safe. All data flowing across the AWS global network is encrypted, and AWS allows you to encrypt your data at rest and in transit. Additionally, AWS provides sophisticated tools for managing access control and keeping your data private. With AWS, you can be confident that your data is secure through:

• Third-party validations
• Assesses thousands of global compliance requirements
• Consistent monitoring of these requirements
• Regular updates to security and compliance controls
• Commitment to the most comprehensive and up-to-date security controls available
• A team of experts available to answer any compliance-related questions

AWS provides the tools you need to build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for your applications. A team of world-class security experts monitors our infrastructure and builds and maintains our broad selection of innovative security services. These services can help you simplify meeting your own security and regulatory requirements.

• Helping you implement your organization’s optimal security posture
• Reducing operational costs and complexity
• Increasing agility and speed

Our team of security and compliance experts can help you take full advantage of AWS’s security and compliance features, ensuring that your data and applications are always safe and compliant. We offer a complete suite of services to help you plan, implement, and manage your AWS environment, including: asset inventory and management, identity and access management, data security, incident response, and forensics. Our team is also highly experienced in working with regulatory agencies such as the PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), so you can be confident that we will always keep your data safe and compliant.

By using Opti9’s AWS services, you can focus on your core business goals while knowing that your data is safe and secure.

Prevent: Establish user permissions and identities, infrastructure protection, and data protection measures for smooth and planned AWS adoption.

Detect: Logging and monitoring services provide visibility into your organization’s security posture. Organize, test, and audit this information in a scalable platform.

Respond: Providing automated incident responses and recovery to help security teams shift their focus from response to analysis.

Remediate: Automate the remediation and security of your AWS environment using event-driven automation.

Opti9 is an Advanced Consulting Partner with Amazon Web Services (AWS). We have over a decade of experience in enterprise AWS migrations and can help your business take advantage of the many benefits of migrating to the cloud. There are many reasons why enterprises are choosing to migrate to AWS. Some of the most common reasons include:

• A desire to reduce on-premises infrastructure costs
• The need for increased scalability and agility 
• The desire to take advantage of AWS’s rich ecosystem of tools and services

Opti9 has extensive experience migrating enterprise workloads to AWS. We can help you get started with your migration by performing an assessment of your current on-premises environment and creating a tailored migration plan based on your specific needs and goals. Our team will then work with you to execute the migration plan, ensuring that your data and applications are migrated safely and securely to AWS.

Once your workloads are migrated, we can help you optimize them for cost and performance. We can also help you train your staff on using AWS to take full advantage of all its features and benefits. In addition, we offer comprehensive support, so you can always reach us if you have any questions or need assistance with anything.

Migrating to AWS offers many advantages for enterprises, including reduced infrastructure costs, increased scalability and agility, and access to AWS’s rich ecosystem of tools and services. Opti9 is an Advanced Consulting Partner with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and can help your enterprise migrate safely and securely to the cloud. We also offer 24/7 support so that you can always reach us if you have any questions or need assistance. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you migrate to AWS.

Opti9 has been a great partner during our migration from our private cloud provider to AWS. The Opti9 team has been highly engaged in the process throughout, providing a planned timeline outlining the migration approach, and then partnering with our technical team to complete the migrations to AWS as planned. There were challenges along the way, but the Opti9 team partnered with our technical team to overcome those challenges and complete the migrations as anticipated. We continue to partner with Opti9 to right-size and optimize our AWS environment, and value the partnership with
the Opti9 team.

Jim Navin

Gavilon CIO

As an Advanced AWS Consulting Partner, we offer a flexible and focused framework that helps organizations transition smoothly to the cloud. Our team of experts also deeply understands best practices in cloud computing. This means that we can help you maximize the benefits of AWS while minimizing the risk of downtime or data loss.

Opti9 can help:

• Plan the change management process for executives
• Define the expected business outcomes
• Get your organization ready to migrate
• Identify the barriers to your migration plan
• Map the technical landscape of your organization

Opti9 has resources, experts, and proven processes to help with every step of the AWS Migration journey. We focus on aligning the plan with your readiness, resources, and objectives and creating a shared vision for the future.

In short, Opti9 is the smart choice for any organization considering an AWS Migration.

Customers have been running Microsoft Workloads on AWS for over 12 years, longer than any other cloud provider. Customers choose AWS because they have the most experience with Microsoft applications in the cloud and offer the best platform for Windows Server and SQL Server.

• Higher performance
• Increased reliability
• Greater security
• Better identity services
• More migration support
• The broadest and deepest capabilities
• Lower total cost of ownership
• Flexible licensing options

AWS supports everything you need to build and run Windows applications, including: Active Directory, .NET, Microsoft SQL Server, Windows desktop-as-a-service, and all supported versions of Windows Server. Our proven expertise can help you easily lift, shift, refactor, or even modernize your Windows workload. Our platform is purpose-built for Windows so that you can get the most out of your investment in Microsoft technologies. And because we’re constantly innovating, you can always count on us to support your business with the latest features and capabilities.

• More than double the performance of the next largest cloud provider for SQL Server workloads
• Cloud provider with twice the number of regions with multiple availability zones
• Five times more encryption services than the next largest cloud provider
• Over three years, AWS Migration Evaluator saved 36% by right-sizing instances
• Running Windows on AWS has a projected ROI of 442% over five years

AWS has the broadest global infrastructure with 77 Availability Zones (AZ) across 24 regions and 99.99% availability for each Amazon EC2 region. By moving your Windows workloads to AWS, customers can realize a 98% reduction in unplanned downtime, 71% faster deployment, and 26% higher developer productivity, per IDC. AWS also delivered 2x better performance and 62% lower cost for a SQL Server workload on an EC2 R5b.8xlarge instance when directly tested against the next largest cloud provider, per Principled Technologies. In addition, AWS offers a variety of features and services that can help you further improve the reliability and performance of your Windows workloads, including auto-scaling, opsworks, and cloudwatch.

AWS is the most secure and innovative cloud platform on the market, offering customers 230 security and compliance services to choose from. With the AWS Nitro System, virtualization functions are offloaded to dedicated hardware and software, minimizing the attack surface for EC2 instances. The Nitro Security chip continuously monitors, protects, and verifies the instance hardware and firmware. In addition, AWS Managed Active Directory securely stores customer information in the cloud, eliminating the need to synchronize or replicate data during migrations. With AWS Identity Services, customers can also manage identities and permissions at scale, providing flexible options for where and how they manage employee, partner, and customer information.

AWS is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully-featured services from data centers globally. Spanning a wide range of computing, storage, database, analytics, application, and deployment services, AWS has everything you need to build and run virtually any workload in the cloud. Migrating to AWS allows you to take advantage of all these services to lower costs while improving your operational agility, security, and compliance.

The AWS End-of-Support Migration Program can migrate legacy Windows Server applications to the latest, supported versions of Windows Server on AWS. The AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) for Windows provides best practices, tools, and incentives to reduce the complexity and cost of migrating to the cloud with support from AWS Partners and Professional Services.

Amazon Web Services offers customers a comprehensive set of tools and services for deploying Microsoft applications in the cloud. With over 350 Amazon EC2 instances, AWS provides customers a wide range of choices for their Windows-based workloads. In addition, AWS offers fully managed services for native-Windows file systems and Kubernetes on Windows, making it easy for customers to reduce management overhead and costs. And with Amazon Elastic Block Store, customers can confidently deploy SQL Server, knowing that their data is highly available and durably stored. Finally, AWS provides the best and most consistent networking performance for Microsoft applications, delivering 3x more throughput and 25% lower latency than the next cloud provider.

Windows on AWS provides customers with several benefits that can help to accelerate growth, drive efficiencies, and realize long-term cost reductions. According to IDC, customers can reduce the 5-year cost of operations by 56% and gain 37% lower infrastructure costs, delivering up to 442% ROI over 3 years. AWS also offers customers more ways to save through unique pricing models such as Savings Plans, which provide savings of up to 72% on Amazon EC2 instances, and Amazon EC2 Spot, which reduces costs by up to 90% on compute instances for fault-tolerant workloads. By taking advantage of these pricing models, customers can further reduce their total cost of ownership.

WATCH: Windows Jumpstart for AWS

Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have partnered to offer customers the most options for using Microsoft software licenses on AWS. Customers can purchase Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) or Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) license-included instances, which come with new, fully compliant SQL Server licenses from AWS.

Additionally, customers can bring their existing licenses to AWS with Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts, Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances, or EC2 instances with default tenancy using Microsoft License Mobility through Software Assurance. AWS License Manager makes tracking software license usage easier and reduces the risk of non-compliance. Together, Microsoft and AWS offer customers the flexibility and choice they need to optimize their cloud environments.

Opti9 has deep experience migrating and managing Windows applications on AWS, and our team has a track record of success in helping customers to minimize disruptions, improve performance, and save money. Our certified consultants can help you plan and execute your migration to AWS, ensuring a smooth transition for your business. With Opti9 by your side, you can be confident that your Windows applications will run at peak AWS performance.

As any business knows, Windows applications are essential for many workflows. However, deploying and managing these applications can be difficult and time-consuming. Opti9 can help you build, implement, deploy, and scale your workloads effectively and securely. We have extensive experience with Microsoft applications and can help you maximize the benefits of these applications deployed on Amazon EC2 for Microsoft Windows Server. Our managed public cloud expertise, paired with our Microsoft experience, enables us to accelerate cloud adoption while maintaining your business continuity. Our Windows application modernization capabilities include: streamlining application architectures, consolidating application workloads, and migrating workloads to the cloud. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you modernize your Windows applications.

WATCH: AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment Overview

AWS provides a set of flexible services designed to enable companies to more rapidly and reliably build and deliver products using AWS and DevOps practices. These services simplify provisioning and managing infrastructure, deploying application code, automating software release processes, and monitoring your application and infrastructure performance. In other words, DevOps combines cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increase an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products faster than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes.

This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market. Thus, by utilizing AWS in conjunction with DevOps practices, companies can reap the benefits of increased speed and agility while maintaining high quality and reliability levels.

If you are an enterprise considering migrating to AWS, training your staff on AWS, powering your DevOps for AWS, or moving your Microsoft Workloads, partnering with an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner like Opti9 is the best way to start your journey. Here’s why:

• We are experts in cloud technologies and have a team of certified AWS professionals.
• We will help you minimize the risk of failures and disruptions during your migration to the cloud.
• We offer a comprehensive suite of services, including migrations, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), backup and storage, monitoring and metrics, security and compliance, DevOps automation, and more.
• We have a proven track record of successful customer engagements.
• We are passionate about helping our customers succeed in the cloud.

There are many benefits to working with an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner like Opti9. We are experts in cloud technologies and can help you minimize the risk of failures during your migration to the cloud.

AWS is a powerful platform that can help enterprises increase agility, improve efficiency, and speed up innovation. However, migrating to AWS or making the most of its features can be complex and challenging. That’s where working with an experienced partner like Opti9 comes in. We have been working with enterprises on their cloud journeys since 2010, and our team of experts will work closely with you to assess your needs and create a tailored solution that meets your specific requirements. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you make the most of AWS.

Opti9 is a team of cloud-certified specialists delivering hybrid cloud solutions to quickly identify problems, proactively help architect solutions, and directly drive business outcomes for your go-forward strategy. Choosing the right partner is crucial when embarking on an AWS cloud journey. Opti9 is an experienced, certified, and comprehensive AWS Advanced Consulting Partner offering services to help enterprises make the most of the AWS platform.

For the last 30 years, we’ve been respected leaders in delivering value by finding the best technology solutions to meet our customer’s business needs so that they can realize the full benefits of the cloud faster. We remain committed to providing outstanding customer service through superior product knowledge, training, technical support, installation assistance, and consulting expertise.

If you’re considering migrating to AWS or need help training your staff, powering your DevOps, or moving your Microsoft Workloads, contact us today to see how we can help you reach your goals.