Costs

Perhaps the most significant factor that tips the scale to the clouds are the costs. When determining those, many only take the raw face value costs into account. In the case of normal hosting, this means the purchase prices of the proper hardware components, and the basic cost for the cloud is the recurring monthly service cost. On the other hand, on-premise solutions have other costs that should not be ignored.

First of all, there is a need for a properly equipped room where the servers can be placed. Their continuous running and cooling can consume a large amount of energy. In addition, the costs are further increased by various maintenance costs. On average, it is advisable to renew or replace on-premise systems every 5 years. Beyond this time horizon, the risks of unexpected failures and malfunctions may rise to such an extent that the cost of renovation is far below the level of the damage caused by any downtime. Nevertheless, in the case of cloud infrastructures no such unexpected expense can rise, the monthly fee includes both operational and maintenance costs.

Security

The most common argument against cloud-based systems is that the data is stored in an external location, which can pose a lot of security risks. Many believe that it is possible to achieve the safest storage method on a dedicated server secured with a custom firewall, even though it is not the plain truth. Different cloud infrastructure providers offer the same security measures to any small company and to their Fortune 500 partners. These are far superior and more sophisticated in recognising suspicious activities and threats to anything an SME could come up with. The following security services are provided by AWS:

• Advanced firewall technologies

• Data encryption services

• Suspicious activity monitoring and filtering

• Safe, direct connection to the cloud

Yet it is a fact that for some companies data management policies directly prohibit the usage of external storages. The solution for them may be the migration of less sensitive business data into the cloud, or the rewriting of obsolete, no longer relevant rules.

In the purpose of being able to help our customers make the most out of the benefits of cloud infrastructures, we participated in the AWS Summit event in Berlin on 26th and 27th of February 2019.

More than 100 workshops offered a great opportunity to fully explore AWS solutions and discover the newest features. Lectures were held on 7 stages simultaneously, where experts from Amazon and some of its partners talked about all the major topics of the IT sector, eg. IoT, DevOps, Networks, Data Science, Big Data, GDPR, Mobile Technologies, Artificial Intelligence and Servesless Solutions. Besides at the so-called AWS World, we had a chance to request detailed guidance directly from AWS technical and sales professionals.

We believe that we managed to create a diverse program plan for the two days, and we would like to highlight the two most exciting presentations:

• 7 Key Reasons Why You Should Run Business-Critical Applications in the Cloud
  One of AWS’ system engineer presented the benefits of cloud infrastructures in comparison with on-premise solutions. The key aspect was placed on safety factors, but he also mentioned the benefits of monitoring, scalability and operation.
• Serverless Technologies
  The presenter demonstrated the creation of a webpage without servers in practice using only AWS services. The basic website based on managed services was completed in less than half an hour. According to the main message of the presentation, it is advisable to use the managed services of AWS.

All in all, it was worth traveling to Berlin and attending the summit, and we are planning to be regular participants in the future as well. We highly recommend participating in the AWS Summit event to anyone interested in cloud infrastructure, since the inspiration we have gained enables us to keep pace with the rapidly developing Cloud world.

Source: Fingent, Privo