Looking for an AWS consulting partner to handle your AWS-based business infrastructure? Here are the points you need to consider while choosing an AWS consulting company for your business.
Amazon Web Services or AWS is one of the most trusted, scalable, flexible, and industry-focused cloud infrastructures. It is the gold standard of cloud and comes with a whole suite of benefits. AWS platform is easy to use, it helps a business to monitor, deploy, and implement cloud infrastructure continuously. By each passing day, thousands of businesses are shifting to AWS and enjoying its big-time benefits.
At this point, the legit question comes into the mind is:
Can anyone use AWS just like that?
The answer is “No”.
Though AWS is great by all means, when it comes to operations, it demands a certain set of expertise and skill to stay in sync.
This is where arises the need for AWS consulting partner or company.
What is the Need of an AWS Consulting Partner?
AWS consultants or consulting company is one of the easiest ways to make sure that you are using AWS in its fullest. These are the certified and skilled professionals who possess all the expertise which is the pre-requisite for AWS configuration and more. These partners provide AWS consulting services, offering you timely solutions for any AWS cloud and infrastructure issues.
Hiring an AWS consulting partner is one way to sure that. Here are reasons in support of the statement –
To Get Expert Assistance – Though AWS is easily available and offer scalable solutions, one needs to have specialized AWS skills to make most out of it. To work in collaboration with AWS consultant or consulting firm, you need not be worried about it. As they are the expert of this field, they know the key principles in a detailed and comprehensive manner.
For Seamless Operations – Hiring AWS consulting company makes the operation seamless and hassle-free. AWS is a vast subject-matter. Whilst the consulting company looks into the AWS management, your IT department can focus on other important tasks.
For the Availability of Whole Skill-set – When you hire AWS consulting, you can have all the skill sets under one roof. If you hire an in-house AWS consultant, s/he might be well-versed in one or two key skills. What about other requirements then? Can you work only with half-assistance? Not at all. AWS consulting companies will have the whole bunch of AWS skills under one roof.
To have an Optimized AWS Solution – Amazon is a firm believer in innovation. That is why it keeps on updating its services. Count AWS in those services as well. When the cloud technology is getting updated each passing day, it is very difficult to update your entire IT infrastructure accordingly. AWS consulting partners work in close proximity with Amazon, they are updated with the latest innovations. Hence, with them, you also get the most updated AWS solutions.
All this is going to happen only if you make the right decision and choose the best AWS consulting partner for your business. It is difficult especially when the market is flooded with so many options and each claim to be best. So, how will you choose your AWS consulting company? Here is the explanation!
Top 10 Points to Consider While Choosing Your AWS Consulting Company
As the AWS consulting company will deal/manage your business data, you just can’t pick anyone. Your whole IT business infrastructure would be in their hands and this fact is more than enough to be extra diligent in the process.
Here are our top 10 points that you needed to consider while you are hunting down AWS consulting company –
1. First things first; find out what exactly you want
Before you go in hunting for an AWS consulting company for your business, it is important to ask a few questions.
- What exactly is your requirement?
- What is your spending capacity or budget?
- For how long you would be requiring this AWS consulting assistance?
- What is the best option for you: in-house or outsourcing?
Pondering over these questions is what you need to do at first as their answers will help you find the best AWS consulting company for your business. For example, if your requirements are once in a while thing that it would be better to hire freelancer AWS consultant rather than hiring a full-time agency. There are many online market places where you can find the exact match of your requirements. This option is also a good option in case of start-ups and small scale industries as freelancer hiring is easy and cost-effective.
On the other hand, if you are into core AWS, you might need a full-time AWS consulting company only. Similarly, you should know your budget as well. There are various options available in the market. But, not everyone falls under your budget limit. So, understanding your need and other related things is more than important before you move ahead.
2. Choose the one which has a certified team
Handling AWS is not as easy as it sounds. It demands tons of expertise. Seeing that, Amazon has come up with a few certifications. Divided as per the modules of AWS, these certification shows that the person is well-versed in the AWS principles and its astuteness is certified as well. When you are choosing an AWS consulting company for your business, don’t mind to ask for the qualification of its team.
AWS certifications offer detailed learning of key AWS concepts. As long as the AWS consultant or consulting company has a team laced with these certifications, it is trustworthy enough. In fact, some of the key AWS consulting companies offer these certifications to their employees and others in order to render the AWS knowledge.
3. Hire the one which offers everything under one roof
AWS is a vast area. It’s not limited to deployment of technology. It expands its functionality into migration, designing, building, monitoring, storage, analytics, application development, networking, and database management. In a whole, there are a total of 90 services which AWS offers. Most of these services will be directly available in the market place. Trained developers can only gain access to them through API.
Out of these services, the most famed one are:
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) – Required for creating virtual servers.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) – Creates a high capacity storage system for your business.
Amazon VPC – Helps business to create private cloud space.
Amazon Route53 – This AWS is essential to do DNS record keeping, create hosted zones and handle DNS queries.
AWS Lambda – It is required to run the codes in response to the event. Also, it is useful in custom logic or creates your own back-end services.
Amazon Glacier – Maintains your data as archival in a non-expensive manner.
Amazon Redshift – It is a fully managed cloud-based, petabyte-scale data warehouse facility offered by AWS. It is also used in internet hosting.
Amazon ElastiCache – It is important for app caching by using Redis and help a business to create Memcached to provide high performance.
Amazon API Gateway – You needs to use this AWS to create, publish, maintain, and monitor REST and WebSocket APIs.
Amazon Elasticsearch Service – It is the most commonly used service that let you use Elasticsearch easily.
Amazon IAM – It is required to control the access to your AWS resources.
AWS CloudHSM – Basically a security system, AWS CloudHSM offers you a specific set of an isolated hardware security module for extra data protection.
These above-mentioned services are commonly used and help you to conduct your IT operations easily and straightforwardly. Instead of availing all these services from different sources, it is better to choose the one which takes care of all these sections. This way, you will be able to save your time and efforts. Plus, when you are procuring anything from a single marketplace, you are likely to get some discounts as well.
So, kindly make sure that you are choosing an AWS consulting company which offers all or maximum of AWS options under one roof. You can be assured about this by asking the service list from your chosen options, and search about their services on the websites. This important step will help you save your money, time, and efforts by all means.
4. Choose from the Amazon Partner Network (APN)
Whatever Amazon does things, it does with perfection, and this fact is unquestionable. Amazon keeps an upgraded list of its premium partners. These partners extensively use AWS, know every tit and bit of AWS, and are certified. Additionally, these offer most of AWS services. Amazon has very strict policies when it comes to granting a registered APN partner.
The pre-requisites of being so are:
- APN Advanced Tier (or higher) status
- Existing employee AWS Certifications
- Customer case studies and workloads migrated
- Dedicated migration practice
- Solution landing page showcasing their AWS partnership
One has to meet these and many more other criteria to gain a place in the Amazon partner list. If you are choosing your AWS consulting partner from this list, it simply indicates that you are going to get par excellence AWS support.
With so many benefits, we can easily conclude that AWS consulting from APN is what can be trusted blindly. For that, you can check the list of premium Amazon consulting partners. Don’t forget that some independent AWS consulting companies can offer better services. So, we recommend you to check everything and then make the final decision.
5. Multiple technical expertise
It is very important that the AWS consulting firm that you are going to pick should be well-versed in multiple technologies. Technologies such as Docker, Python, Angular, iOS, C++, Java, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, MySql, PHP, and Hadoop are some of the key skills are the part of your day-to-day AWS operations. That is why it is imperative that your future AWS consultant/ AWS consulting firm should be competent enough in these technologies.
6. Choose the one which has its own in-house AWS experts
There are some of AWS consulting firms that outsource AWS consulting practices. In that case, you are using the services via the third-party channel. Dealing with third-party can be a little daunting at times. For example, if you face some issues, your consulting firm will forward the concern to the third-party. In that case, you may have to wait for some extra time for the solution. So, it is more than imperative that you pick the one which has its own team of AWS consultant ready to serve as soon as the need arises.
7. Ask for the quotes from different AWS consulting companies
Though each of AWS consulting firm may offer more or less same services, they differ in cost. Some may cost a fortune while others can be little pocket-friendly. So, when you are planning to hire an AWS consulting company, make sure that you gather information from more than two options. Ask for the quotes and services offered in lieu of that costing and do a real-time comparison at your end.
While doing so, one thing that should never go out of sight is the quality. You need to make sure the companies which you are considering are the same in terms of service quality. Each should have a certified team and offer more or less the same services.
8. Never overlook the after-sales services and technical support
It’s true that with a certified AWS consultant or consulting firm, you need not worry about AWS infrastructure. But, what if you got some issue once solutions were delivered?
Technical issues are obvious and can occur at any time – even after the service delivery. If you have outsourced AWS completely, you may not be able to understand a bit of these technical issues. You again need the assistance of your AWS consulting at this point. So, it is very important that you are checking the after-sales services and technical support of your future AWS consulting partner beforehand.
You can ask for their after-sales policies, refer to their terms and conditions, and check what sort of follow up they offers. They should have a dedicated customer care center to answer your queries. As a single failure in your existing AWS infrastructure can lead to many problems, it is important that they must be highly responsive towards your concerns/complaints and take immediate actions.
9. Prior work experience and impressive portfolio
Work experience counts in every case. When you are choosing your AWS consulting partner for your business, make sure that you are selecting the one which has handled the job in prior as well. Minimum of 3 years experience makes an AWS consulting company a trustworthy pick.
Most of the companies showcase their client list/portfolio on their website. We suggest you go through all of these thoroughly. By doing this, you will be able to gain an insight into the previous work of the company. In addition, this step is also important to understand whether its competency meets your requirement areas or not.
10. They should be able to cater to the multiple sectors
Every sector demands a different sort of AWS solutions. If you are an organization which serves various companies then you should hire AWS consulting company that is capable to design, deploy and monitor AWS solutions for different industries. If you want AWS consulting partner for your own business, then choose the one which is perfect is handling that kind of industry.
Final Words
AWS is the spine of your IT operations. That is why it is very important that you choose a reliable resource and hand over the job to them. AWS consulting companies are there to reduce your efforts and burden and ensure you about the quality, up-to-the-minute, scalable, flexible, and inexpensive AWS solutions.
Your AWS consulting partner will build a successful AWS consulting practice for your business. So, pay attention to the above-mentioned points while choosing your AWS consulting partner to choose the best one.
