With more than 15 years in the marketplace, AWS has become the clear leader in the cloud computing sector, offering solutions that cater to businesses of all sizes. TrackIt has grown alongside AWS by specializing and differentiating itself in the Media & Entertainment market and helping customers migrate their workflows to the cloud.
Although moving to the AWS cloud can help a business in many ways, below are six of the most common benefits:
- Reduced Infrastructure Costs
- Cost Optimization
- Flexibility, Scalability, & Responsiveness
- Security & Disaster Recovery (DR)
- Remote Work Friendly
- Enhanced and Enabled Innovation
Contents
1 – Reduced Infrastructure Costs
One common misconception is that the cloud is expensive, where in reality, it’s often the most appealing reason for companies to adopt AWS. The cloud offers a significant reduction in infrastructure costs due to the often over-provisioning that can occur on-premise. Choosing the AWS cloud means that companies can provision exactly what infrastructure is needed, scale up or down quickly, and enjoy reduced upfront costs and maintenance hassles.
Companies additionally realize savings by no longer bearing the cost of equipment, hardware, and utilities, as well as the physical facilities required to host all of that infrastructure. The reduced need for on-premise infrastructure also reduces the need for qualified and often high-cost staff to manage and maintain it.
In 2019, Pixelogic Media found itself with nearly all of their on-premises storage being filled to capacity. Rather than continuing to expand their local storage, they decided a sustainable cloud archiving solution to free up space would provide both a cost reduction and long-term content management benefits. TrackIt helped Pixelogic successfully implement this archiving pipeline and leverage Amazon S3 Glacier for long-term secure, durable, and cost-effective data archiving.
2 – Cost Optimization
AWS’s flexible pay-as-you-go pricing plans allow businesses to optimize their ROI by ensuring that they pay only for what they use. This is a huge advantage over on-premise workstations, servers, and storage because it doesn’t require a large upfront capital investment, and is easily and quickly scalable up or down as needs change. In addition, the AWS costs are recognized as day-to-day operating expenses versus long term capital expenditures that depreciate over time, which may offer tax and budget benefits.
In addition to its flexible pricing plans, AWS also provides businesses with the ability to monitor and manage their resources on a granular level. The granular control provided by AWS empowers businesses to optimize cloud spending by actively monitoring and adjusting their cloud deployments on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis.
By implementing effective tagging of their AWS resources, businesses can gain additional visibility to better track and manage their infrastructure use. Tagging also enables businesses to optimize the allocation of expenses to different cost centers for budgeting purposes. TrackIt, in partnership with AWS has published an article on the importance of Tagging on the Amazon Partner Network (APN) blog titled ‘How Better Tagging Can Help Organizations Optimize Expenses and Improve ROI’. The article provides readers with a comprehensive understanding of AWS tags and also introduces readers to Tagbot, an affordable, easy-to-use, and effective tool developed by the TrackIt team to enable users and maximize the utility of their AWS tags.
3 – Flexibility, Scalability, & Agility
The COVID-19 pandemic was a massive trigger for cloud adoption across multiple industries. There was a spike in demand for remote access and communication as more employees and clients chose to work from home. Although some have returned to the office, remote access has become a new reality and has permanently changed the way people work. Businesses now know the flexibility and responsiveness offered by the cloud, especially when faced with rapidly changing business environments.
AWS delivers on this need by providing flexible resource provisioning that enables businesses to scale up or down based on their business cycles, adjusting capacity to maintain steady and predictable performance at optimized costs. AWS provides reliable and highly responsive access from almost anywhere on the globe. Its ever increasing network of high performance data centers around the world means that users can have high speed data access and collaborate regardless of their location.
HOPR, an award-winning post production company, had to reconsider its workflow during the COVID-19 pandemic and decided to adopt a cloud-based pipelines that would allow its artists to work remotely. TrackIt helped HOPR implement Amazon Nimble Studio, an AWS service that allows companies to run their creative studios and production pipelines entirely on the cloud. The implementation allowed HOPR to reimagine its workflow and connect their creatives and clients around the world seamlessly.
4 – Security & Disaster Recovery (DR)
Data security is of paramount concern for anyone considering cloud migration. AWS has developed a Shared Responsibility Model between themselves and their users to ensure that data integrity remains robust and continues to evolve. It outlines that AWS is responsible for securing the underlying infrastructure, including the physical and virtual resources that make up the cloud environment. This includes the tight security of data centers, network infrastructure, and the various services that run on the AWS platform. In return, customers are responsible for securing their data, applications, and access within the AWS environments.
The security of the AWS cloud infrastructure enables businesses to cut down on in-house security costs, and take advantage of a dedicated team entirely focused on protecting their infrastructure from the latest threats. Security professionals at AWS engage in multiple layers of data surveillance including data protection, IAM, threat detection, continuous monitoring, infrastructure protection, compliance, and data privacy.
For Disaster Recovery, businesses that adopt the AWS cloud are free from the hassle of having to manage and secure a separate physical location for data backups. AWS provides businesses with multiple options for Disaster Recovery of varying levels of complexity ranging from low-cost approaches such as simple backups to more complex strategies involving the usage of multiple active Regions.
5 – Remote Work Friendly
In addition to allowing employees to remain connected and productive during travel, migrating to the AWS cloud gives businesses the freedom and opportunity to explore workspace mobility and flexible work schedules. Businesses can embrace remote work cultures and dip into a global pool of talent.
For example, it has become popular for media companies to adopt AWS services like Amazon Nimble Studio, where users are able to facilitate seamless collaboration between VFX artists and editors spread across the globe. This level of collaboration not constrained by geography, capacity or bandwidth would be difficult to achieve without cloud services like AWS.
6 – Innovation
Businesses that migrate to the AWS cloud can use it as a platform for innovation, a blank canvas with almost unlimited options to explore. The vast range of services that AWS offers coupled with its flexibility and cost-effectiveness ensures that companies can effortlessly try out new ideas or business models without making huge financial commitments.
This level of innovation is difficult to achieve with on-premise resources that require significant capital investments. Now IT managers have the opportunity to explore new workflows and test applications without long-term financial commitments. This freedom will undoubtedly bring about innovations that may not have been possible with the freedom of the cloud.
About TrackIt – AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner
TrackIt is an Amazon Web Services Advanced Tier Services Partner specializing in cloud management, consulting, and software development solutions based in Marina del Rey, CA.
TrackIt specializes in Modern Software Development, DevOps, Infrastructure-As-Code, Serverless, CI/CD, and Containerization with specialized expertise in Media & Entertainment workflows, High-Performance Computing environments, and data storage.
TrackIt’s forté is cutting-edge software design with deep expertise in containerization, serverless architectures, and innovative pipeline development. The TrackIt team can help you architect, design, build and deploy a customized solution tailored to your exact requirements.
In addition to providing cloud management, consulting, and modern software development services, TrackIt also provides an open-source AWS cost management tool that allows users to optimize their costs and resources on AWS.