As an AWS (Amazon Web Services) Advanced Consulting partner we tend to work with organizations who have already realized the value of moving to the cloud and they engage us to assist with their migrations or figuring out the total cost of ownership. To better assist future companies moving to the cloud, I am addressing the most logical questions and fears and how to overcome them with AWS.

What are some of the reasons companies are afraid to move to the cloud?

Traditional companies, especially in the small to medium sector, have an inexplicable fear of migrating to the cloud; fears related to the unknown, change, not being able to touch their shiny objects, increased costs, and the list goes on.

Let me take some time to address these fears and show you some of the benefits of moving to the cloud when you are a traditional small to medium sized business:

1. Trade CapEx for OpEx – Typically businesses are able to see a large reduction in capital expenditures by moving to the cloud as you can reduce the investments required into infrastructure for a potential future workload and start paying for the resources as you consume them.
2. Economies of Scale – AWS is able to achieve a lower cost than you can get on your own and therefore is able to pass those savings onto their customers.
3. Workload Issues – In a traditional IT environment, you are required to guess at what future workloads will look like and build to that. At my previous employer, while cloud computing was in its infancy, I had to spend over $1MM to build capacity for a very specific workload 8 weeks a year. Today, I would be able to create the workload in AWS and only pay for it while it is running.
4. Security – I recently attended the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington DC and Sean Roche, the Associate Deputy Director of CIA for Digital Innovation, made this quote “The cloud, on its weakest day, is more secure,” which is something I fully agree with. When you are the traditional small to medium-sized business, you can’t afford to have a security engineer on staff and AWS has hundreds, if not thousands of security engineers working for them constantly innovating, researching and mitigating issues.
5. Availability – As a small to medium-sized business you are probably one hard drive failure, misconfiguration, natural disaster away from losing revenue. Moving to AWS you are able to automate high availability that only kicks in when an issue occurs.

Why is ArdentMC encouraging companies to move to AWS?

ArdentMC can assist companies with their migration to AWS cloud computing services and are equipped to provide knowledge, expertise, and the best technical customer service available. As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, we are required to have employees who have attained their professional AWS certifications. AWS offers a dependable, reasonably-priced cloud service, and is free to join- you purchase what you need on-demand. Your company will immediately see the benefits of migrating to the AWS cloud.