Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of those necessary tools that is ubiquitous, yet few truly understand how it works or how it originated in spite of the fact that we all reap its benefits on a daily basis. With this blog post, I want to give ordinary folk (of which I decidedly am one!) a better understanding of why we at Bynder choose to be partners with Amazon Web Services.
The best way to get a good grasp of what Amazon Web Services is, how it works, and how it concerns you, is to put both Amazon and AWS into context.
Over the past decade or so, business applications have developed from desktop-centric installations, to client/server solutions, to service-oriented structures (SOA’s). Without a question, this has been an evolution that has touched the lives of anyone using business applications – so, anyone who has ever used stored data in the course of their professional endeavors. Moreover, each step in this technological evolution (and revolution!) has built on the knowledge and best practices produced as a result of the prior stage, and has brought its own problems, challenges, and golden opportunities to all involved.
The most recent rung in the ladder of technological development has been virtualization – that is, the act of creating a virtual version of an IT infrastructure. In layman’s terms, this means that instead of a physical library full of data, data is most commonly now stored within a virtual data cloud. Virtualization has allowed for a reduction in business operating costs, and an increase in data reliability that was unfathomable even a decade ago.
For businesses, this means that the speed of technological change has paved the way for new product creation, completely and irrevocably changing the way markets work in the process. Lightning-fast download and upload speeds for data are now the norm, as is the business need for global access to data storage. Today, the newest, biggest, and most exciting challenge to IT infrastructures is cloud computing - or working and storing data in the cloud - an IT solution that AWS, due to its excellent reputation, has come to represent.
Amazon was always a frontrunner in the decentralized IT infrastructure game. By 2005, having managed the world’s largest online retail platform for over a decade, Amazon launched Amazon Web Services in order to help other organizations to benefit from the large-scale, reliable and efficient global web platform Amazon had worked so hard to build. Today, AWS serves millions of customers (including Bynder, as well as such giants as Vodafone, Unilever and NASA) and handles billions in commercial transactions daily.
We have gone into great depths in blogs like this on the importance and advantages of cloud computing to Bynder, our partners, and our clients, so I will simply say that the advantages of investing in a cloud-based solution by far outweigh the disadvantages, no matter your circumstances. Within the industry, however, cloud computing has one major advantage – in, fact THE advantage that can either make or break a particular technology - as cloud computing is future-proof, (or as future proof as technology can get). Cloud computing allows for flexible, secure, and, perhaps most importantly, low-cost IT infrastructures, taking the burden of storing, updating, and managing an IT infrastructure off the shoulders of organizations themselves. In the context of Bynder, this means that instead of you as an organization being tasked with buying and maintaining servers, providing updates and security testing, and overall being completely in charge of your data, with cloud computing, Bynder can do all this for you at a fraction of the cost. Thus, cloud computing offers an enterprise-level IT structure built and maintained in a reliable and hugely cost-effective manner, yet not one you have to create or manage yourself.
What this means for you as a marketer/creative/business-owner is that data storage on a major scale is more within reach than it has ever been. No longer are digital asset management or marketing resource management solutions solely for the multination conglomerate – AWS has brought wide-reaching reliable data storage to the masses on an unprecedented scale.
