Amazon Web Services (AWS) upped its enterprise cloud offering this month with AWS Managed Services – but it may not be the right fit for every enterprise looking to move to the cloud.
Designed for the Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 enterprises of the world, AWS Managed Services aims to ease the process of deployment, migration, and management of the cloud through automation and machine learning. It builds on already existing AWS services through a set of integration points of APIs and CLI tools.
That focus on the Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 audience may work for existing AWS enterprise customers, or for those looking to move their entire infrastructure to the cloud in one go, but not for the rest.
“Amazon’s move into the managed service provider space is exciting news for companies committed to AWS environments,” Bali Kuchipudi, SoftwareOne’s product marketing lead, told CDN. “For enterprise-grade organizations operating on a single-cloud platform, AWS Managed Services will help them deploy an efficient AWS environment.”
SoftwareOne’s Bali Kuchipudi
“However, companies looking to make the move to the cloud or manage a smaller AWS environment will have to look elsewhere for CSP support, as AWS Managed Services isn’t built to scale down,” he continued.
For existing AWS customers and those who plan to adopt its cloud platform fully, AWS Managed Services is an enticing opportunity, and will certainly help those who are interested in its offerings. For the rest, the issue may stem from the fact that by adopting AWS, companies could be ignoring a recent trend in cloud adoption – multi-cloud platforms.
“While other cloud providers do offer a layer of managed services, the market for CSPs and MSPs is maturing towards multi-cloud platforms,” Kuchipudi said. “Organizations of all sizes are looking for an aggregation of services across clouds and they want insights from multiple providers.”
SoftwareOne, for instance, deals with customers who are deploying onto the cloud slowly, and sometimes that means using a variety of cloud services, not just one. As more and more turn to the cloud, it has become clear that in most cases it isn’t a one-and-done move.
For those Fortune 1000 or Global 2000 enterprises who are looking to only move one aspect of the business to the cloud, AWS Managed Services may not be the right fit either, unless they can scale it down to one department.
“While this new AWS feature will be a powerful tool for a subset of existing AWS customers, we’re interested to see how AWS will address the growing demand for multi-cloud MSP tools,” Kuchipudi said.
The discussion regarding AWS Managed Services comes just after the cloud provider announced the opening of a new Canadian region, and a few weeks after AWS announced much more at its Re:Invent Conference.