Amazon Web Services continues to chew its way upward through the “stack” of computing services that organizations require, moving from its original infrastructure and platform as a service, to development tools and recently announced container management, and now, this week, to IT staffing and practices.
AWS Managed Services, announced this week, is a tacit recognition that moving to and optimally using the cloud, though appealingly expandible and potentially economical, requires administrative rigor and a lot of IT know-how. It can be costly to hire the requisite talent, as shipping firm Matson found after it eliminated its own data centers and went all-in on AWS.
So here’s AWS with Managed Services (MS), a people-and-technology offering aimed at Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 companies and intended to cut both costs and risk. The offering automates common activities such as change requests, monitoring, patch management, security, and backup services, and it will provision, run, and support a corporate infrastructure, according to AWS. It follows Information Technology Infrastructure Library best practices and provides a monthly summary of key performance metrics, including operational activities, events and their respective impact, as well as recommendations to optimize platform usage. In addition to technology, Managed Services relies on “a dedicated team of Amazon employees.”
AWS Managed Services would seem a threat to the myriad partner companies that offer consulting in migrating to and using AWS. But Amazon is taking steps to draw them into the new offering. It has set up two new training programs for its partners to help their customers use MS. One partner, Cloudreach, in a blog post called MS “a key solution . . . where the heavy lifting of management and control can be outsourced to AWS.”
Managed Services is available immediately to manage AWS resources in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions, with others coming online “as soon as possible.”
