Introduction
AWS Managed Services (AMS) is a set of services that help an organisation adopt AWS at scale to operate more efficiently and securely. It is typically provided in tandem with an accredited AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP) such as Mobilise.
This article aims to explain what AMS is, how the MSP Program works, and the benefits of the services to potential customers. We will also outline Mobilise’s competitive AMS offering as one of only 9 UK MSPs and a leading AMS partner.
What is AWS Managed Services?
AMS is an enterprise service that provides ongoing management of your AWS infrastructure. It enables organisations to adopt AWS at scale, offers guidance, and will implement operational best practices. AMS provides full-lifecycle services to provision, run, and support your infrastructure. To achieve this AMS will leverage standard AWS services as well as the use of specialised automations, skills, and experienced professionals who can create a solution to fit your best needs.
AWS states that it provides, ‘proactive, preventative, and detective capabilities that raise the operational bar and help reduce risk without constraining agility’. This is because an AMS solution is adaptable. It is designed by expert Solutions Architects based on your needs and the context of your existing architecture(s). Therefore, an AMS solution is suitable for a range of customers who have IT architectures that may vary in terms of modernization, usage, and design.
The Managed Service Provider Program accredits AWS Partners who have the necessary experience and provisions needed to provide end-to-end AWS solutions to customers at any stage of the cloud journey. This ranges from solution design to cloud migration and continued service management. Importantly, an MSP must pass a rigorous independent audit that ensures their business health and technical capabilities meet high standards. As a result, an MSP is validated by AWS in the four key areas of the AMS provision:
- Planning and design,
- Building and migration,
- Operations and support, and
- Automation and optimisation.
AWS Managed Services: the benefits
Performance
AMS brings massive benefits to the performance of an organisation. It involves the use of AWS’s leading suite of technologies, platforms, and applications as well as expert delivery by a trusted MSP. The customer benefits from a team of experts that specialise in cloud infrastructure management. They will provide technical excellence that is hard to find and/or may not have been available to the customer internally.
Ensuring quality, resiliency and continuous improvement are key aspects of the AMS operating model. This model is based on a continuous learning mechanism that evaluates workloads and pipelines against changing security policies. In turn, performance efficiency is enhanced using advanced automation. This allows the provider to focus on complex customer problems and continuous improvement mechanisms to achieve customer outcomes.
This service will allow you to optimise and improve your cloud and IT infrastructure. In turn, this will improve the operational efficiency and performance of your organisation as a whole. It will inject innovation and allow you to focus on your operational goals.
Cost Management
An important fact about AMS is that you only pay for the services you use. A clear pricing model will ensure that costs are transparent and predictable, making cost management straightforward. Proactive cost-saving measures help customers drive down costs. This may include the use of Spot Instances, Right Sizing, and Savings Plans.
AMS has actual and realisable cost saving potential. AWS have found that, on average, the service realise annual cost savings of 10 to 15%. Additionally, it removes the burden of cloud maintenance and monitoring from in-house teams. This frees additional resources, allowing you to reinvest and/or redeploy resources that would otherwise be frozen.
Scalability
AMS addresses the often-complex scaling needs of modern organisations. It does this by automating many infrastructure activities such as change requests, patch management, monitoring, security, and backup. Auto-scaling is powerful because it allows IT infrastructure to seamlessly scale up or down without any impact on business-as-usual.
It should also be noted that, with secure access available to your resources from anywhere in the world, you can scale your teams like never before. Notably, Amazon Workspaces & Appstream allow global users to securely access corporate services.
Information & Network Security
Critically, AMS provides world leading security excellence with security monitoring and remediation as well as safety mechanisms that provide preventative and detective controls. This proactive support is delivered on a 24/7 basis and includes over 150 managed guardrails and security checks. Notably, AWS estimates that 80% of incidents are proactively detected and notified before becoming an issue.
This is important due to the increasing risk and rate of cyber security worldwide. Cybersecurity Ventures, for example, predicted that ransomware would attack a business every 14 seconds as of 2019.
Significantly, AWS’s cloud infrastructure and data centres are extremely secure, being developed in line with the most stringent security requirements in the world. Their infrastructure is monitored 24/7 to ensure integrity and all data across the AWS global network is automatically encrypted at the physical layer before it leaves secured facilities.
Uptime & Downtime
Crucially, an AMS mitigates downtime and improves availability. This is important because downtime and system failures are major and expensive risk factors. For example, industry research has found that 98% of organisations say a single hour of downtime costs over $100,000.
To manage this, AMS includes the continuous monitoring and maintenance of your infrastructure as well as features such as auto-scaling to meet demand. This reduces downtime and ensures critical business systems remain highly available.
Compliance
An AMS helps your organisation to stay compliant with necessary data and technical regulations. AMS’s compliance control offers substantial support and will accelerate the path towards reaching compliance requirements. Notably, AMS has achieved compliance certifications and attestations against PCI-DSS, HIPAA, HiTrust, GDPR, ISO, SOC 1, 2 and 3. Additionally, AMS has pre-authorisation to operate workloads which require FedRamp Moderate.
Backups & Updates
Regular backups and updates streamline operational activities, provide additional protection, and optimises performance. An AMS involves the installation of updates on behalf of organisations as well as the facilitation of regular and secure backups. Importantly, this reduces the operational load on an organisation, allowing you to drive performance and focus on your delivery aims.
Choosing an AMS Provider: the Mobilise offering
AWS Managed Services can be understood as a service that reduces costs while providing new capabilities to your existing infrastructure with a flexible cloud offering that manages current business requirements and allows for rapid innovation.
Mobilise are an AWS Partner and one of only nine UK providers to obtain Managed Service Provider (MPS) Status. Additionally, Mobilise is also an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, Immersion Day Partner, Public Sector Partner, and Well Architected Partner. As an AWS MSP we have been successfully audited on the following criteria:
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Read more about Mobilise’s Managed Services offering.
