“Managed services” is when a company outsources IT services and operations to a third-party provider. The provider would be responsible for round-the-clock monitoring, for managing any IT-related problem, and even for resolving issues for the client. Amazon AWS has recently come out with its own managed services offering.

It is still the first few days of 2017 and it’s really shaping up to be a good year for businesses that are using Amazon services. Now, these companies can take advantage of the IT and retail giant’s managed services together with its other public cloud offerings. Enterprises can use AWS Managed Services to help move legacy applications to the AWS cloud.

AWS Managed Services is specifically composed of several tools to manage business infrastructure operations. It helps businesses with their ongoing management, monitoring, security and support when they use AWS on the cloud.

AWS Managed Services taps Amazon employees and partners who are certified to do various functions. It is available to the biggest AWS clients who are planning to move their workloads to the public cloud service of Amazon.

Two different types of workloads

According to Lydia Leong, a distinguished analyst and vice president at Gartner, there are two types of enterprise workloads. These are cloud-native and traditional.

AWS Managed Services are for those companies that want to move their traditional workloads to the public cloud.

Leong says that Amazon is aiming to have these traditional workloads run with more automation in place. As such, AWS Managed Services will give top corporations, or those who belong to the Fortune 100 bracket, an automated platform that is used for managed services.

These tools will help users gain access to automated process for moving their applications to the cloud, and then managing these applications once the migration is finished.

Amazon AWS Managed Services uses best practices from ITIL to ensure top-notch IT service management.

Features

Some of the features that users would find on AWS Managed Services include:

• Change management, or having automated approval processes in place for modifying or changing an AWS environment.
• Incident management, or being able to investigate errors and correct them.
• Provision management, or being able to deploy pre-formed stacks of applications and infrastructure
• Patch management, where the service would be in charge of patching your operating systems, as well as keeping your resource current. Current supported OSes include Microsoft Windows Server 2012, Amazon Linux, and RHEL 7.
• Access management, where you get the best practices in security. AWS Managed Services can simplify access management by using identity and access management roles and security groups of AWS ECS. You no longer have to stress over a variety of authentication mechanisms – just one corporate credential to access all AWS resources.
• Security, anti-malware, intrusion prevention and other threat detection.
• Continuity management, or quite simply backups.

Amazon AWS Managed Services will also have reporting features, giving you insights on monthly performance indicators and metrics, as well as detailed records of all activities done within the AWS cloud environment.

CloudReach’s Euan Reid also says that Amazon AWS Managed Services uses an exclusive change management API that would govern all deployments and changes. CloudReach is one of the certified partners for this service.

Reid explains that the AWS Managed Services offering will have highly detailed and comprehensive logs that even the strictest auditors would appreciate.

Other partners include 8K Miles, Capgemini, CloudReach, CSC, 1 Strategy, Accenture, CloudNexa, Slalom, Smartronix, LogicWorks, and Rackspace.

While this may sound like a competing offering to Amazon’s own consulting and system integration partners who may have the same service, it really is not. If anything, AWS Managed Services caters to large businesses that need help migrating to Amazon’s public cloud. This might help when it comes to AWS adoption, allowing Amazon to sell more AWS services, as it attracts big companies that are looking for expert automation, infrastructure management and monitoring services.

As Reid explains, this is not the end for smaller AWS managed services providers. Reid cites Betteridge’s Law in explaining that the new Amazon service gives large customers automatic patching and backup services, but it has advanced capabilities that might not be suitable for the target market of EC2 System Manager, which offers similar services. Also, Amazon AWS Managed Services does not include automation for the platform layer, just the infrastructure support.

AWS Managed Services is currently available in the United States’ West and East regions, Sydney, Australia, and Ireland.

Benefits

So what are the advantages of using AWS Managed Services?

• AWS Managed Services will be responsible for the day-to-day operations of your AWS environments.
• AWS Managed Services gives you standard deployments that make it easier for you to achieve compliance with your company policy. It uses Trend Micro Deep Security for added protection while its infrastructure templates are compliant with AWS best practices.
• AWS Managed Services gives you a dedicated Cloud Service Delivery Manager and Enterprise support at no additional fees.

If you are looking to migrate your applications to the cloud and you are not qualified to get Amazon AWS Managed Services, or if you operate in an area that does not have the service yet, then you will appreciate Four Cornerstone. AWS Managed Services is similar to Snowmobile in such a way that you need to talk to an AWS representative first. There is currently no price on the Amazon site, and you still have to call to know how much it costs.

Four Cornerstone can be your Amazon AWS partner! We can help you with your migration, as well as with using other AWS services. You can gain all the benefits of working with AWS Managed Services without the stringent requirements or qualifications at a very low cost.

Call Four Cornerstone today at +1 (817) 377-1144. We have a team of experts that can help you move your applications to Amazon’s public cloud and other AWS services. We also offer enterprise business intelligence solutions. Allow us to help you unleash the power of your data through our Business Intelligence solutions.

Photo courtesy of Colin Charles.