Although 2020 is finally behind us, its effects will continue to reverberate throughout 2021. The new year brings more challenges for today’s business professionals, whether you’re a high-powered CEO, the owner/president of a mid-sized company, or an entrepreneur just getting your small business off the ground.
Technology keeps changing at an increasingly faster pace, challenging businesses to keep up. Innovation’s rapid growth raises the stakes for today’s companies, as competitors can gain an edge if they master and monetize the latest information technology developments before anyone else does.
Cloud technology continues to influence how we work, play, live, and do business, and there are many cloud platforms to choose from, each with its unique services. Today we are focusing on Amazon Web Services, today’s most popular cloud platform, and the best services it offers for businesses.
Let’s take a look at the five best AWS services that can give your business that extra boost and distinguish it from the pack.
Amazon S3 Your data storage oasis.
Big data is here to stay, and for many businesses storing and retrieving massive amounts of information is incredibly difficult. S3 stands for Simple Storage Service and is Amazon’s answer to the glut of data out there in today’s digital labyrinth of IT services.
Amazon S3 offers a simple way to transfer data that also allows you to store, upload, and retrieve huge files up to 5TB from AWS.
💡 Amazon S3 is a highly secure, low-cost, cloud-based, scalable storage method. Get this - it’s triple-redundant. Meaning that S3 stores your data in three different data centers within a given area or region. Not only does triple-redundancy increase your data security, but it also provides almost zero latency and offers high performance. Businesses can also manage, classify, and report on their data whenever needed, enabling teams to discern important patterns for business operations. On top of this, Amazon lets you control the data's public and private accessibility with incredible specificity.
Amazon S3 enjoys a considerable following, including major companies such as Siemens, Georgia Pacific, and Sysco. Suppose your business is primarily dependent on handling massive volumes of data. In that case, Amazon S3 is a smart, cost-effective choice that gives your company access to the same powerful resources as the major corporations.
You can use Amazon S3 to maintain extensive customer databases, storing information such as buyer history, contact information, and payment information. Businesses with extensive inventories or complicated supply chains need the kind of data processing that S3 offers.
Amazon EC2 Everyone’s go-to for scalable cloud servers.
Why throw money away on maintaining costly IT infrastructure when Amazon EC2 lets you create virtual machines and other server management services? Since you’re charged for it hourly, Amazon EC2 is very cost-effective because you only pay when you’re using it. Businesses also save on maintenance costs since the cloud service handles those.
However, if managed incorrectly your business can find yourself paying a large price, so it is also important for you to source highly qualified talent for your EC2-backed initiatives.
💡Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) enables you to control things like ports, storage, and security, allowing you to configure everything to your particular needs. The EC2 virtual system is easily scalable and integrates smoothly with other services. If your business specializes in web/mobile applications and software development, wait why aren’t you already using Amazon EC2? It's powerful, scalable computing capacity makes it easy for developers to create and deploy applications effectively and quickly. Along with numerous small startups, major companies using EC2 include heavy hitters like Netflix, Uber, Pinterest, and Airbnb. And Amazon, of course! That’s a pretty impressive lineup for any small business to become part of.
Amazon CloudFront A lightning bolt for content distribution. ⚡️
It may sound like a meteorological term, but CloudFront is actually a fast content delivery network (CDN) that securely delivers applications, API, data, images, and videos to customers. Overall, it improves website speed and access to data stored in the cloud.
💡Amazon CloudFront’s developer-friendly environment offers low latency and high transfer speeds. CloudFront boosts sharing speeds of dynamic and static web content, including .html and .css files. Amazon CloudFront is ideal for businesses that rely heavily on their websites for conducting business. For instance, places that don’t have a brick-and-mortar storefront and rely solely on Internet sales would greatly benefit by using CloudFront.
Online customers, as a rule, have very little patience for purchase glitches. Therefore, if a business that functions predominantly online wants to attract and retain customers, it must make every effort to deliver a hassle-free, swiftly moving customer experience. Using Amazon CloudFront, web-based businesses can remain competitive as they increase their client base and improve customer loyalty. If unprepared for traffic spikes, small companies can end up mortified by disgruntled customers visiting their website and encountering the ominous 404 error.
Big businesses such as Spotify, Slack, Dropbox, and Instacart use Amazon CloudFront. So, if your business is looking for fast and secure content delivery, you must opt for CloudFront. With more people shopping online and e-commerce sales expected to surpass $740 billion by 2023, your company can’t afford to pass it up.
Amazon SNS A complete messaging and notification system.
SNS (Simple Notification Service) lets you stay connected with your users by sending messages and notifications to everyone, regardless of platform, phone, or computer. You can stay in constant contact with your customers by sending emails, HTML endpoint messages, simple queue services, and texts to mobile devices and distributed services and systems.
💡There are two types of clients in Amazon SNS: publishers and subscribers. Publishers create and send the messages to the subscribers via communication channels. Subscribers get notified by the publisher via one of the supported protocols such as Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service), Lambda, HTTP, etc. You can even send any number of messages to as many users as you want. Amazon SNS is an “event-driven cloud computing hub.” This means it employs pre-designated triggers that alert end-users from the numerous other services AWS offers. For example, if your customer downloads a large report which needs extra processing, AWS can be set to trigger an email to notify the customer that the report is ready.
Companies that use Amazon SNS include Domino’s Pizza, and Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Smaller companies can benefit from Amazon SNS by using it to send confirmation messages to customers who order a product online or who subscribe to a specific topic that the business has set up. Amazon SNS makes it easy for businesses to keep in contact reliably and securely with their customer base.
Businesses need strong relationships with their customers and with technologies like Amazon SNS, there’s no excuse for missing out on end-user notifications.
Amazon Glacier The long-haul storage system.
You have no doubt heard or read about people finding artifacts, bodies, and even germs, in melting glaciers. The ice and the intense cold preserves things so well that in 2010, hunters found the remains of a 39,000 year-old wooly mammoth in Siberia!
With that discovery in mind, it’s fitting that AWS calls its online file storage Amazon Glacier. At this point, alert readers may say, “Wait a minute, we’ve already read about S3, which is the AWS’ cloud-based data storage! Isn’t this redundant?”
As it turns out, no, it isn’t. Like Amazon S3, Glacier offers users a secure, simple, cloud-based data storage service that can be scaled up or down as the need demands. Whereas S3 gives users rapid access to their critical data, Glacier is designed for less urgent, inactive data, placing it in long-term storage. This data storage option is ideal for data types that, though important, don't need to be quickly retrieved; it usually takes between three to five hours to retrieve data from Glacier. This long-term, slow-moving data storage method is called “cold storage,” which brings us back to why AWS named their service “Glacier.”
Amazon Glacier fulfills the role of a data archive. This information is rarely accessed but too valuable to just delete and forget. If your data needs to be accessed often and quickly, S3 is your pick, not Glacier.
However, Glacier is ideal for archival storage, backup processes, and disaster recovery since your company’s data represents everything necessary about the business and what makes it tick. Losing that information could be catastrophic.
Glacier is also very cheap (prices start at 0.004 per gigabyte per month). However, Amazon sometimes charges extra for data retrieval, though that hinges on the amount of data retrieved and what type of data plan the customer has.
Now your IT staff doesn’t have to decide what data they should keep or permanently delete. The situation will inevitably arise where a piece of data that everyone thought was useless suddenly becomes essential! Using Glacier, your business can ship off old data into cold storage inexpensively and be ready for any emergency.
Companies that use Amazon Glacier include Whole Foods Market, Fox News, and Stanley Black and Decker.
Tying it All Together So, why use AWS? The cloud offers small to medium organizations the chance to compete with larger firms and corporations by outsourcing all the work it takes to maintain complex servers. The cloud levels the playing field by offering cutting edge information technology resources in a form that’s easily affordable and scalable.
But every business is different, and consequently, so are its needs. That’s why it’s essential to get educated on the available choices and selecting the options that work best. You don’t want to under or overspend.
Amazon AWS is the most popular cloud service platform available today, and with the wide array of services they offer there is likely more than one AWS service for you. This is the point where you either research the subject on your own or consult an expert.
Whatever platform and services you end up with, make sure it’s the result of an informed decision. Shop around. The resources are out there; all you have to do is make the right choices and equip your business to be competitive in the 21st century.