Selecting Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a momentous decision because what you get is a cloud platform that provides a highly resilient, scalable, and low-expense boost to your IT infrastructure.
AWS is constantly innovating its massive repertoire of services. The snag is that managing your cloud ecosystem could become a handful even for developers with skills and experience.
It would be best if you had outside expertise and experience to take advantage of AWS so that your organization can ride a growth trajectory with confidence. For that to happen, the AWS consultant comes in handy.
The importance of AWS consulting is undeniable because the certified AWS partner creates one of the most efficient business environments in the tech market for building successful AWS-centric solutions.
What You Do Before You Engage An AWS Consultant
- Know your business mojo: Acknowledge your strengths and visualize the growth model and direction you wish to follow.
- Define your goals: In clear and straightforward ways, decide what your business wants to achieve. An in-depth analysis of four factors will help you shape your goals:
Agility: This is the skill with which you adapt to market challenges, and a partner with good knowledge of the industry will show the way.
Time to market: You know your strengths and weaknesses by sourcing real-time analytics data. The AWS partner speeds up the market delivery of products.
New tech tools: Tools are the key to managing your computing processes, storage, and databases. The partner leverages tools and technology that are appropriate for the company.
Cost Savings: Apart from the competitive pricing of AWS services, and partner fees, the company must consider the budget allocation for business expansion.
Outline your priorities: You must review and rank existing applications, the efficiencies they deliver, the costs they reduce, and the revenue lost per downtime before migrating to AWS.
The Five Factors You Consider When Choosing A Reliable AWS Consultant
Businesses moving to cloud computing in retail grow faster when they identify the right AWS consultant. Follow these pointers, and you’ll never go wrong.
1. Once You Know Your Requirements, Consider How The AWS Consultant Will Fix Issues
Is the partner clear about your motivation to shift to the cloud? Can you achieve your goal with the budget you allocate? How long will it take to migrate to the cloud, and how will the partner assist your in-house IT team? Which tech tools are ideal for your business?
With answers coming thick and fast, you get ample opportunity to judge the capabilities and expertise of the consultant.
2. Probe The Credibility And Experience Of The AWS Consultant
Analyze the consultant’s working style by probing past clients and their feedback. Independently scrutinize the consultant’s client portfolio and do your due diligence on the consultant’s technological prowess and industry exposure.
A consultant with AWS certification is a game-changer because your company benefits from expert insights and access to technological resources.
3. Choose the Consultancy Firm Affiliated To The Amazon Partner Network (APN)
AWS certification for a consultant is laudable, but having affiliation to the Amazon Partner Network (APN) is tangible proof that you are betting on the right horse.
An APN membership implies that the consultant answers to higher performance standards. Amazon creates a tier system to assess how effectively partners achieve and sustain training and customer engagement goals.
4. Be Sure That You Get A Team Of Dedicated And Experienced AWS Support Engineers
Once you migrate to the cloud, AWS becomes fundamental to your business success. At this stage, you will need the AWS enterprise support ecosystem to overcome technical issues, keep applications running in top condition, and provide end-to-end support across the cloud platform.
By hammering out the terms of engagement with the prospective consultant partner, you judge how comprehensive and reliable the AWS support service is.
An APN partner firm in the high-performance tier should have no issues furnishing team members’ AWS certifications, case studies, and experience in migrating workloads.
5. Assess The Consultant’s Expertise In New Technologies
The immediate priority of the AWS consultant is to fine-tune your engagement with the cloud platform and ensure that you skillfully navigate available resources, benefit from the tech tools at your disposal, and develop innovative solutions that deliver the best results.
These are the skill sets that an AWS consultant should possess in developing high-end cloud solutions for business:
- Writing code in Java, Python, C#, or any other programming languages that determine the functionality of AWS services.
- Hands-on expertise in Route 53 (DNS), CloudFront (CDN), and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to network public and private subnets and enable internet access and VPC peering.
- Expertise in data storage using S3, Relational Database Service (RDS ), and full-fledged Hadoop clusters to choose the best way to store data.
- Familiarity with Identity and Access Management (IAM ) solutions determines which services and resources users can access.
- Consultants should know SQS (simple queuing), SNS (notifications), and RDS (Relational Database Service) to decide the AWS functionality suitable for the company.
- Mastery of cloud computing patterns provides better solutions to recurring problems. The consultant must decide when to go serverless using AWS Lambda to optimize computing resources and lower costs.
- Excellent communication skills are vital to the consultant who can break down complex concepts into actionable points and convince you why his solution is the best.
The Bottom Line
Formulating your cloud computing objective is essential, but deciding your AWS consultant is critical to your success. You need to put in much effort to know what it takes to get the ideal AWS consultant to service your needs. Use the tips we outline to assess the effectiveness of the AWS consultant and how transformative cloud migration will be to your business.
