Happy Birthday Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server on AWS!

A post by Teresa Carlson, VP of Worldwide Public Sector, Amazon Web Services

Happy Birthday! It has been 10 years of our customers running Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server on AWS. Our government customers are some of the largest users of Windows. As public sector customers are looking to modernize their infrastructure, they have been turning to AWS. They trust their Windows workloads on AWS because of our experience, reliability, security, and performance. In fact, IDC (a leading IT Analyst) estimates that AWS accounted for approximately 57.7% of total Windows instances in public cloud IaaS during 2017 – nearly 2x the nearest cloud provider.

It is important for our public sector customers to have modern and flexible infrastructure to meet their demanding mission needs. For Microsoft Windows applications, reliability is critical. Organizations have traditionally provisioned applications for peak demand and disaster recovery (DR) scenarios, which often leave IT resources idle or underutilized. With AWS, you can improve reliability with cloud backups and optimize costs by paying only for the cloud resources you use.

Windows on AWS allows government, education, and nonprofit organizations to save money that can be put back into their mission, whether it is delivering services to veterans or improving the learning experience for students.

Take for example, one of our customers, Kaplan. Kaplan was running 12 different data centers across the organization and started moving its applications to AWS to consolidate its infrastructure. As part of the move to the cloud, Kaplan migrated approximately 50 applications and 50 nested sub-applications in its stack.

Our public sector customers deserve the best technology to be able to dream big without being constrained by legacy technology. Read more about how customers are running Windows on AWS and licensing options from Sandy Carter, Vice President of Windows on AWS and Enterprise Workloads, in her blog post: Celebrating 10 years of Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server on AWS! Happy Birthday!