Why Amazon Cloud Services are so Successful

Until the end of 2015, Amazon's web services (AWS) was relatively a lesser known entity in the business environment. People used to think only as an extended entity of Amazon.com. It was the beginning of 2016 when Amazon disclosed the revenue figures of its AWS services for the first time in its Nine-year history. For the first quarter of 2015, AWS garnered approximately $1.5 billion dollars, later it grew to the $1.8 billion in the next quarter, and followed by $2 billion in the third quarter. It was a huge profit considering Amazon is not known as an IT giant but an e-commerce business company. Since then AWS has been considered as a primary choice of any enterprise-based cloud services and covers almost 80% of cloud business today.

Amazon Web Services incorporate different cloud computing products and services. For example, it provides servers for your web site, storage, networking, remotely access of your computer, emailing, mobile app development and security.

Two main products provided by AWS are EC2 (The virtual machine service of Amazon) and S3 (Storage system of Amazon).

We can say that Amazon Web Service is so big and omnipresent that it is 10 times bigger than its nearest competitor Microsoft Azure. Some most popular websites like Instagram (social media) and Netflix (On-demand videos) are hosted on AWS.

North America(6 regions)-

1. Northern Virginia

1. Sao Paulo

1. Ireland

1. Tokyo, Japan

Each of these International regions has multiple availability zones where its servers are located. These regions are divided in order to provide cloud services to its client to their nearest geographical locations. But it also provides security by diversifying the physical locations in which data is stored.

Jeff Bezos (Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Amazon) has compared the AWS cloud services to the manufacturing companies of early Nineteenth Century. At that time, when companies needed electricity for their daily operations, then they used to build their own power plants. When the government started to providing electricity to the companies, the need for a dedicated power plant decreased. 

AWS services follow the same principle that companies should not need to establish a dedicated IT infrastructure but their necessary resources are saved on the cloud.

Before the advent of cloud technology, companies used to store their large amount of data to a dedicated physical storage and manage it. Storing on the cloud would mean that companies would have to purchase online space and pay for the whole space whether they use it or not. Same is applicable for the extended computer machinery. Even if the organization is not using them, they still need to manage it and pay a hefty amount for its constant maintenance.

All such complexities are removed after AWS came into the picture. Now companies will pay for only what they use. There is no advanced cost to develop a storage system and no need to predict their future usage. Companies only pay for what they use and costs are charged accordingly.

As the price of AWS services is dependent upon the user's usage many small, medium and startups businesses can easily afford to have a cloud platform for their limited resources. In reality, Amazon web services have motivated many people to start their businesses as they can get all the required tools and services to initiate a business venture.

For already existing companies AWS provide a safe and easy migration services by which all of their resources could be moved to the cloud very easily. As the company will grow they don't need to think about expanding the computer resources as the elasticity of the AWS services enables businesses to focus only on their operations and removal the need of examining their computer resources.

There is no doubt that AWS cloud storage is much more secure than an organization's own hosting services. AWS has dozens of data centers scattered globally and are monitored 24*7 and maintain a tight security. These data centers are completely autonomous and are unaffected by changes in other data center's data. If a disaster occurs then only the respective data center will lose its data and remaining date centers will remain completely safe.

Amazon has tried to keep its data centers completely out of the sight of a normal person so that it could be saved from unauthorized access and external threats. These data centers and all their data are safe from intrusion and any external or potential attacks could be handled easily. Such security cannot be applicable for a small business's lone data center where only a single IT person is managing the large data himself.

Content Source : https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-amazon-cloud-services-so-successful-ruchhir-agarwal