Understanding the benefits and challenges of operating in the cloud

Organizations want to focus on the value-added services their business provides and address the needs of their end customers. For many, this means continuously improving application features and reducing the time to market. To achieve these business outcomes, organizations can harness the benefits of the cloud, such as agility, reliability, and scalability. You can optimize application feature releases by adhering to continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and Development Operations (DevOps) practices. Application modernization can also help you effectively use cloud-native services.

However, it can be difficult to implement these practices and optimizations if staff is focused on day-to-day cloud operations, such as monitoring, incident and problem management, patching, backups, and security management. These tasks can limit the amount of time available to focus on value-added activities. Ultimately, this can lead to staff attrition, high operational costs, loss of organizational trust in IT operations, and eventual decline in customer satisfaction. The following are the some of the key operational challenges that organizations face in any cloud environment:

• Achieving security, compliance, and reliability

• Prioritizing or focusing on undifferentiated tasks

• Reducing and optimizing operating costs

• Finding and retaining cloud talent

• Ongoing implementation of operational best practices

AWS Managed Services (AMS) is designed to help organizations overcome these challenges and achieve operational excellence in the AWS Cloud.