According to a survey of nearly 200 AWS customers by Nucleus Research, those economic benefits are real. The report, “Benchmarking Availability and Reliability in the Cloud: Amazon Web Services,” points to large benefits when it comes to downtime. Planned downtime went down 29% and unplanned downtime 32% just by moving to AWS.
Downtime equals loss of productivity which equals lost revenue — so every little bit of uptime really matters.
Nucleus chose the customers surveyed carefully so they offer good results. All 198 customers questioned had to have migrated an in-house app completely to AWS, and spend at least $10,000 a month on AWS.
There are four main business and technology drivers behind AWS adoption.
– Less capital expense: With the cloud, spending shifts from CAPEX to OPEX, and hopefully the OPEX expenses are predictable and affordable.
– Speed of provisioning: With the cloud, it is faster to provision new apps, and even faster to add capacity to existing ones.
– Agility: AWS allows for more frequent changes to application, which is known as iteration.
– Better backup and increased redundancy: AWS offers storage in the cloud, which can be a safer way of backing up your data, as well as increased application redundancy so there is less downtime.
“Nucleus found that 53 percent of AWS customers surveyed reported completely eliminating planned downtime requirements after moving workloads from their environment to AWS.
It is important to note that AWS customers often reported that any planned downtime on AWS did not lead to actual service interruptions, since any software or processing instances could simply be migrated to a different domain while the existing domain was being maintained. In contrast, obviously, in on-premises data center environments, companies had to either purchase redundant equipment for support during maintenance windows or schedule downtime during periods where lack of availability would have limited disruption,” the company said. “In addition to less scheduled downtime, Nucleus found AWS customers were able to increase reliability by reducing unplanned downtime. The average AWS customer was able to reduce the unplanned downtime by 32 percent. Additionally, unexpected downtime events were resolved more quickly in AWS than previously when the applications were running on-premises, enabling customers to reduce the hours devoted to issue resolution by 26 percent.”
Planned downtime was likewise reduced. In fact, unplanned downtime incidents went down 64% after moving from a pure on-premises infrastructure to AWS.
Nucleus also saw that IT is largely released from the burden of fixing and supporting apps. This means IT can do more strategic value-driven work.
“The AWS customers surveyed reported a 67 percent reduction in the number of employee hours needed to support and repair applications after moving workloads from on premise environments to AWS,” Nucleus said.
