Enterprise IT Infrastructure

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The Challenge

Many enterprises maintain and operate their own IT infrastructure — a task that is rarely their core competency and that often distracts from differentiating their business from competition and providing value for their customers. Shared hosting environments such as co-location facilities do not alleviate the burden of paying up-front for infrastructure, nor of maintaining and operating it. In addition, nearly all organizations incur wasteful costs in time, money, and productivity when purchasing and maintaining extra capacity to serve the needs of spiky applications or to meet changing internal business needs.

Hosting internal- or external-facing IT applications in the cloud can alleviate some of this burden by providing access to on-demand, cost-effective resources. If you are looking for a cloud environment in which to migrate your existing on-premise applications or deploy your new solutions, consider the following questions:

• Do I have the flexibility to choose the programming model, operating system, and application platform stack currently in use within my organization?
• Can I quickly, securely, and reliably link my existing infrastructure with my cloud-based infrastructure?
• What kind of commitments or contracts will my cloud provider require? Will I have large up-front costs?
• How quickly can I respond to spikes and lulls in demand from my customers or application computing loads?
• Will I be able to empower internal development teams to quickly innovate to meet the needs of my business?
• Does my cloud provider have experience in maintaining a global, redundant, and resilient infrastructure?
• What security considerations has my cloud provider addressed?

Enterprise IT Using AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers reliable, scalable and cost-effective computing resources on which to deploy your corporate applications. You can use the following AWS components alone or combined to build your hosted application solutions:

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). Amazon VPC offers a secure and seamless bridge between your existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud. Amazon VPC enables you to extend your existing management capabilities such as security services, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems to include your AWS resources. Learn more

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Amazon EC2 provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. You define your virtual Amazon EC2 environment with the operating system, services, databases, and application platform stack required for your hosted application. Amazon EC2 provides a full management console and APIs to manage your compute resources. Learn more

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It is durable, highly available, and secure. Amazon S3 also stores multiple redundant copies of your data. Learn more

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable database capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks. Learn more

Amazon SimpleDB. Amazon SimpleDB provides the core database functions of data indexing and querying. You can write your applications to take advantage of Amazon SimpleDB’s simplicity and its ability to scale seamlessly. Learn more

Amazon CloudFront. Amazon CloudFront provides a high performance, globally distributed content delivery system. Your application can use Amazon CloudFront to easily distribute or stream content to your users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, no commitments, and seamless integration with Amazon S3. Learn more

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS). Amazon SQS provides a high performance, secure queuing system for your application that enables you to reliably distribute work between your application’s processes. Learn more

Amazon DevPay. Amazon DevPay is a simple-to-use online billing and account management service that makes it easy for businesses to sell applications that are built in, or run on top of, Amazon Web Services. Learn more

Amazon Mechanical Turk. The Amazon Mechanical Turk service is a marketplace for work and provides programmatic access to human intelligence. This service can be used from your hosted application to provide human judgment (for instance image tagging or data cleansing) on-demand, cost effectively and at any scale. Learn more

Benefits at a Glance

Easy to use. AWS is designed to minimize much of the heavy lifting of setting up and managing your own IT infrastructure. You don’t need to purchase and configure hardware. You can get started with AWS in minutes and take your idea and deploy it to your customers with minimal friction. And, you can use the AWS Management Console, a variety of third-party management tools, or the well-document AWS web service APIs to manage and maintain your cloud infrastructure.

Flexible. With AWS, you can configure your deployment environment to including the operating system, application platform, patches, and so on that your application requires. This eases the migration process for existing applications while preserving options for building new solutions. If you’re building or deploying new enterprise solutions, AWS offers not only the flexibility to select the programming model you’re most comfortable with, but the opportunity to take advantage of a host of time-saving, value-added services, including databases, queues, parallel processing engines, load balancers, and more.

Cost-Effective. You pay only for the compute power, storage, and other resources you use, with no long-term contracts or up-front commitments. For more information on comparing the costs of other hosting alternatives with AWS, consult the AWS Economics Center.

Reliable. With AWS, you take advantage of scalable, reliable, and secure global computing infrastructure, the virtual backbone of Amazon.com’s multi-billion dollar retail business that has been honed for over a decade.

Scalable and high-performance. Amazon’s massive compute capacity and storage enables you to scale your application’s compute and storage requirements as your business grows.

Secure. AWS utilizes and end-to-end approach to secure and harden our infrastructure, including physical, operational, and software measures. In addition, Amazon VPC enables you to create a secure link between your existing IT infrastructure and your compute resources in the AWS cloud. For more information, consult the AWS Security Center.

Enterprise IT Resources