Why You Need to Invest in Managed AWS Hosting

Another key difference between traditional IT and the cloud is that AWS hosting isn’t just a case of deploying your environment and leaving it alone to run itself.

A cloud-based IT requires continual monitoring, management, and optimisation from whoever is responsible for its hosting. Otherwise, it won’t be able to continue performing as you need it to.

Of course, you want to be able to focus entirely on your own priorities, whether that’s managing your team or running your business. It’s unlikely you have the time or the resources to be constantly worrying about whether your IT systems are operating properly.

Unfortunately, unless you’ve taken a strategic approach to finding the right hosting services, that is a problem you’ll eventually end up facing.

If you’ve read this far, your business likely already has some processes, workflows, or applications hosted in the AWS cloud platform.

If so, do any of the following scenarios sound familiar?

• You’re working with a platform-specific hosting partner, but are unhappy with the service or want to move to a different provider
• You had a consultant deploy your cloud for you without a strategy in place, and now you have to plan for the long-term
• Your existing hosting provider doesn’t offer any additional support, and you need more help maintaining your cloud environment
• You have an in-house team supporting your cloud, but are facing challenges due to a skills gap
• You’re experiencing erratic costs and surprise charges.

If any of these issues resonate with you, the time has come to explore different options with managed AWS hosting to find a better solution.

There are several options available when it comes to AWS hosting. The important thing is to figure out which will be the most suitable choice for your business’s specific situation.

It’s also worth mentioning here that the most suitable choice right now might not be in a year or six months, so remain open-minded. We’ll explain this in more detail later in the article.

Whether you need to take care of the hosting of an entire cloud-based IT infrastructure, or you only have a few applications in the cloud and need someone to look after your environment, it’s crucial to find a solution that best meets your unique requirements.

The most common hosting options include:

1 – Manage your cloud hosting in-house

If you decide to procure your AWS hosting directly with the cloud provider, you’ll be responsible for all the set-up, configuration, and management of your own virtual IT environment.

This means you’ll have to ensure your team has the cloud-specific skills and experience necessary to keep your cloud running without any problems. This will also take up a significant amount of time and resources for those people.

Unfortunately, this isn’t easy. As mentioned earlier, managing a cloud estate is very different to managing an on-premise IT infrastructure. You might have done this to begin with, and are now looking for a partner to take over the cloud management or cloud hosting for you.

2 – Work with an AWS hosting partner

Alternatively, you can find a partner to host and deploy your workload in the cloud for you. In some cases, this will ideally come with some additional support and consultancy from the partner, but not always.

This tends to be the most common approach organisations take today, especially if they’ve adopted the cloud without a holistic strategy in place.

However, working with an AWS hosting partner or consultant is usually extremely costly, or it can be highly cost-effective when you’re able to find the right one. If you’re relying on multiple partners for different aspects of your cloud infrastructure, and aren’t receiving any additional services from your hosting partner, you could end up significantly over-spending.

When assessing your options or deciding which option to take for your AWS hosting, it’s important to be aware of the trends affecting the cloud market as well.

These considerations may need to be factored in before you make a final decision on where you go next, as they could each have an impact on your bottom line.

Below are the highlights but we have published a complete article on cloud trends which discusses many of these points in more detail.

Please read our article about cloud trends for 2022 / 23 here

IT Chip Shortages

There’s currently a global chip shortage in the enterprise IT market, and this is affecting all the major providers. This means there’s a much longer lead-time than usual to get on-premise hardware, and many large data centres are unable to get enough equipment to support all their customers.

Inflation

With inflation rising globally, the OpEx model of cloud infrastructure-as-a-service is currently a more appealing prospect than investing a large sum into a physical data centre.

The traditional on-premise approach to IT hosting now comes with higher risks than ever before, as the demand for remote work and business agility are at an all-time high.

Businesses are increasingly migrating their systems to the cloud, as it continues to present the most financially sensible option for enterprise IT.

Skills Shortages

The digital skills gap is having an impact across most industries at the moment, and this has been the case since before the COVID-19 pandemic turned the world upside down. For example, in 2019, the Open University’s ‘Bridging the Digital Divide’ report discovered that 88% of UK organisations admitted to facing a shortage of digital skills.

Finding in-house employees who have enough cloud-specific experience is a challenge, especially in a job market that’s recovering from ‘the great resignation.’ These people come at a very high cost these days.

It’s going to be more cost-effective to leverage intelligent automated tools to handle most of your core processes for you, rather than hiring someone new and paying them a hefty salary.