Category: Thought Leadership

Backup compliance in AWS includes defining and enforcing backup policies to encrypt your backups, protect them from manual deletion, prevent changes to your backup lifecycle settings, and audit and report on backup activity from a centralized console. AWS Backup Audit Manager, a feature within the AWS Backup service, provides built-in compliance controls for these areas. […]

AWS Systems Manager lets you safely automate common and repetitive IT operations and management tasks. Furthermore, Systems Manager Automation lets you use predefined playbooks, or you can build, run, and share wiki-style automated playbooks to enable AWS resource management across multiple accounts and AWS Regions. Snowflake, the Data Cloud, is an APN Partner that provides […]

In this blog post, I share my observations as an AMS Solutions Architect on how achieving operational excellence can help organizations realize their cloud business objectives while migrating to AWS. I dive deep into the five design principles that AWS Managed Services (AMS) uses to achieve operational excellence. Amazon is guided by four principles: customer […]

Amazon uses a number of AWS services to help meet increased traffic and demand during Prime Day events. As Jeff Barr has mentioned in his previous blog posts, some key services used in Prime Day include: Amazon DynamoDB handles the trillions of Prime Day requests. Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) enables shoppers to shop […]

The first post in this series, Reinventing automated operations (Part I), covered the importance of operations in the cloud and how deferring the creation of an operations plan can slow down your migration. In this post, I’ll share the primary mechanism of iterative improvement (aka flywheel) that AWS Managed Services (AMS) uses to increase operational […]

AWS provides a flexible and secure environment where you can experiment, innovate, and scale more quickly. As you build and deploy your workloads, you need mechanisms to isolate your resources (for example, a resource container). You can use multiple AWS accounts for this purpose. An AWS account provides natural security, access, and billing boundaries for […]

In the first post of this two-part series, we showed you two approaches for preventing cost overruns in a centralized budget management pattern: Applying a restrictive service control policy (SCP) to an organizational unit (OU). Moving the account to another OU with restrictive SCPs. In this post, we share how you can prevent cost overruns […]

The Three Lines Model developed by the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) helps organizations identify structures and processes to facilitate strong governance and risk management. In that model, the first-line function manages risk, the second-line function oversees risk and the third-line function provides objective and independent assurance of risk management. According to a Deloitte analysis […]

You can use AWS Organizations to centrally manage and govern multiple accounts within your AWS organization. The service includes a management account, which has permissions to create accounts and manage and govern underlying infrastructure. The management account has wide permissions and access to accounts within the organization, so it should only be used for absolutely […]

This is the first in a two-part series that covers lessons learned at AWS Managed Services (AMS) as we help customers and partners achieve operational excellence on AWS. To create a secure and consistent cloud operating model, you need both operational experience and AWS skills. In my conversations with customers, it is common for experienced […]