AWS Cloud for Start-Ups & SMEs: What Are The Benefits?
For business organizations like start-ups and SMEs (small-medium enterprises), when it comes to choosing IT infrastructure, it would usually involve choosing between building their private server or using cloud computing services such as Microsoft Azure, or Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Today, businesses are shifting into the cloud, as many cloud computing services are becoming increasingly more affordable, along with improved security and extra flexibility. Cloud computing services offer a host of benefits compared to private hosting, allowing start-ups and SMEs access to virtually unlimited storage and processing power. Additionally, organizations only have to pay for the cloud resources that they need instead of investing a significant sum upfront to purchase all the necessary hardware and hiring IT specialists building private servers.
Currently, Amazon’s AWS is the leader in the cloud market worldwide, capturing over 32% of the market share, with customers including various tech powerhouses like Netflix, Facebook, and Apple.
In this article, let’s explore some of the benefits that AWS can offer and how it can be a suitable cloud solution for your start-up or SME.
Benefits of Using AWS for Start-ups and SMEs
Free Trial and Training
For starters, AWS offers a trial for your development team to test out many of its features and explore the platform - enabling developers to understand how AWS products work and whether they can be a good fit for your project requirements.
Since this is a full trial, for example, you can access, deploy, and run your software on AWS EC2 for 30 days free on a real production environment, and thoroughly understand the cloud advantages, and how your applications or website performance differ compared to your on-premise server.
By gaining in-depth and hands-on experience with AWS products, you'll be able to prove AWS advantages before committing to a long-term plan with AWS based on your needs and other business conditions.
Furthermore, cloud technology enables time-saving in various ways. For instance, rolling out cloud solutions using AWS allows for quicker learning with many training programs available. With the rise of the working from home model requiring frequent collaborations and communications, a cloud solution is definitely the way to go.
Costs saving and scalability
One considerable benefit when it comes to cloud computing services is their cost-effectiveness. Instead of having to pay for hardware and equipment as well as other operations expenses like electricity and premises rent, startups can reduce their total cost of ownership by paying only for the resources they use, and scale up or down according to demand.
For many startups that are growing and not able to accurately estimate their resources need in advance, this model can prove to be significantly beneficial, enable flexibility and cost-savings in the long term. Many enterprises have considerably saved from operating costs by moving their infrastructure into the cloud.
Improved security
When opting for an on-premise private server, your in-house IT team will be in charge of all the tasks related to building, upgrading, and maintenance of your software products and the underlying IT infrastructure - which translates to additional costs and efforts. More importantly, this could also lead to security issues and software bugs that take additional time to fix.
By switching to AWS, the development teams will be able to create secure applications based on a robust infrastructure with built-in security measures and encryptions.
The responsibilities of security tasks are now shifted to the cloud vendor (AWS), freeing up the time and resources for the development team to focus on more important tasks.
High performance and reliability
In the past, when businesses opt to use their own private, on-premise servers, once the server goes down, the entire system would also go down as a result. This translates to the loss of revenues, and significantly impacted business reputation and customer loyalty. With AWS, your application will be hosted by the underlying infrastructure stored across different places. Furthermore, you can also leverage the auto-scaling advantage of AWS to prevent the likelihood of disruption that will take down your entire system.
You can use AWS Chaos Monkey to test run various scenarios to identify how your cloud environment will be affected and applies optimization to your environment as required before any significant event occurs.
Quick and efficient deployment
Generally speaking, traditional hosting services would require up to several days to set up a server, which means startups need to plan to ensure adequate provision of services, especially in case of surging requests leading to the crashing of services. By choosing AWS cloud, startups can significantly lower the deployment time to only a total of a few hours. In particular, AWS enables the efficient handling of the surge in traffics, when startups launch a new service or product into the market.
AWS services like CodeDeploy can help automate the deployments of software to services including Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda, as well as your on-premise servers, which reduces manual intervention as well as reduces errors in the process.
Strong Technical Features and Capabilities
The AWS services offerings include more than 100 products that can meet all the needs of your development needs, depending on the project-specific requirements and business use cases - ranging from storage, networking, databases, advanced analytics, mobile, security, and more.
Here, many of your tools and technologies requirements are met by AWS, making the development projects become easier, and leaving the implementation to be completed by the development team skills. Again the development team skills can be enhanced through AWS training programs.
Conclusion
Business organizations need to stay innovative and competitive in the new era of a digital economy. Thanks to cloud computing services like AWS, start-ups tech leaders can build the capacity to scale their IT infrastructure resources and meet the market demand as their businesses expand. Furthermore, The limitations imposed by traditional technologies are now removed, allowing businesses to optimize and grow effectively.
