Innovative was announced as a launch partner for the AWS Generative AI (GenAI) Competency – READ ARTICLE

Category: AWS

Innovative Solutions Achieves the New AWS Generative AI Competency

 
ROCHESTER, N.Y. (March 6, 2024) – Innovative Solutions, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Tier Services Partner, announced that it has achieved the AWS Generative AI (GenAI) Competency. This specialization recognizes Innovative as an AWS Partner that helps customers and the AWS Partner Network (APN) drive the advancement of services, tools, and infrastructure pivotal for implementing generative AI technologies.

Acquiring the AWS Generative AI Competency differentiates Innovative Solutions as an AWS Partner that has achieved technical proficiency and proven customer success, as demonstrated by their 10+ case studies. Innovative Solutions possesses the experience and expertise demonstrated through successful projects addressing customer challenges using generative AI solutions, predominantly in the healthcare and financial services industries. These solutions enable digital transformation strategies for augmenting the customer experience, delivering hyper-personalized and engaging content, streamlining workflows, and delivering actionable results powered by generative AI technology from AWS.

Travis Rehl, SVP of Product and Services at Innovative Solutions, says, “We are so excited to achieve the AWS Generative AI Competency as proof of our excellence in the generative AI space. It’s a testament to the maturity and agility of our organization and how it has strategically aligned with industry and market demand.”

The AWS Competency Program aims to assist customers in connecting with AWS Partners who possess extensive knowledge and technical expertise in using AWS technologies and best practices to adopt generative AI. These AWS Partners facilitate the seamless integration and deployment of AWS-based solutions to meet the unique needs of all customers, from startups to global enterprises.

AWS’s recognition of Innovative’s expertise has resulted in new ways to address customer challenges. This includes a customer growth initiative with IBM to provide service offerings that combine software from IBM with cloud infrastructure from AWS.

Tailwinds, Innovative Solutions’ packaged offering launched on AWS Marketplace, is just one example. Tailwinds is built on the IBM watsonx AI and Data platform, powered by Amazon Bedrock, using the large language models (LLMs) – Anthropic and Cohere. It enables small businesses and startups to rapidly and cost-efficiently adopt generative AI technologies, allowing them to be technology leaders in their space by saving money through staff efficiency gains while providing new products and services to their end customers.

“We can offer a packaged solution to our customers on AWS Marketplace and already have dozens of production customers and systems in place. Achieving the AWS Generative AI Competency makes it clear that our customers can trust Innovative as a vetted and experienced AWS Partner for generative AI — and move quickly with us to find a solution,” says Justin Copie, CEO of Innovative Solutions.

Innovative Tailwinds

About Innovative Solutions

Innovative believes that every company will become a technology company, and we’re here to help. Recognized as an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner. With an army of cloud experts and the Innovative Cloud Runbook utilizing leading cloud technologies, Innovative gives businesses of every size the confidence to grow in the cloud with generative AI, application modernization, cloud migrations, AWS cloud hosting and resale, managed cloud services, cloud cost optimization, cloud security monitoring, and IT consulting.

Want to learn more? Contact us today.


Learn more about Tailwinds

Tailwinds Assessment

Tailwinds Assessment helps organizations develop a comprehensive strategy to successfully adopt and implement Generative AI technologies.

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Tailwinds OnRamp

Create a best-practice Generative AI solution with all the tools you need and quickly integrate it into your business

Learn More

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How companies are using Innovative Tailwinds to enable their businesses with Generative AI Technologies

Many SMBs and Startups are partnering with Innovative Solutions to leverage their expertise in generative AI.  Innovative Tailwinds enables businesses to develop applications using techniques like large language models, computer vision, and predictive analytics to automate processes and create new value for customers.

Learn more about Innovative Tailwinds

Innovative Tailwinds

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Managed GenAI is here and Innovative is leading the pack with Tailwinds ChitChat and MDS

We are excited and immensely proud to unveil Managed Service for Generative AI –  MDS (Managed Data Services). MDS is our commitment to innovation and excellence in the realm of AI-driven data management. At Innovative Solutions, we recognize the transformative power of AI and the critical need for streamlined data services.

MDS is engineered to transform small to medium-sized businesses and startups, giving them a formidable tool to propel their growth and solidify their competitive edge in the market.

Empowers SMBs and Startups on Their GenAI/Data Journey

Envision your business, confidently launching sophisticated AI applications, diving deep into BI reporting, and fine-tuning ML models. MDS equips you with the assurance that your data infrastructure is not just robust but also scalable, evolving effortlessly with your burgeoning ambitions.

Crafting Your Data Narrative

Businesses have unique requirements, and MDS is structured to meet an organization where they are in their life cycle. Our tiered approach—Good, Better, Best—is designed to mirror the unique chapters of your business’s growth story.

Whether you’re establishing the foundation with our essential services or scaling new heights with advanced capabilities and committed support, MDS is crafted to align with your expansion, smoothing out the traditional bumps of scaling data pipeline teams and tools.

MDS navigates the complex web of data integrations with finesse, enabling you to focus on steering your business’s core operations. More than just a managerial tool, MDS is an engine for innovation, powering strategic decision-making with actionable data insights. This strategic approach doesn’t just sustain your business but launches it into new territories of innovation and value creation.

IBM + AWS, best in breed, and nothing less

MDS brings together the capabilities of IBM and AWS, providing SMBs and startups with a solution that stands out in the market for its reliability and scalability.

IBM’s time-tested expertise in complex data analytics merges with the dynamic, expansive cloud infrastructure from AWS to deliver a service that’s fast, flexible, and future-proof. This integration means that MDS users gain instant access to the best of both worlds: robust analytics and machine learning tools from IBM, and the vast computing resources of AWS.

It’s a combo that accelerates the path from data to actionable insights, ensuring our customers can react swiftly to market changes and business opportunities.

Our commitment materialized: Tailwinds ChitChat Managed Services AI Assistant

Tailwinds ChitChat

ChitChat is a free service to all Innovative Managed Services customers, including MDS.

ChitChat has a number of key features tuned for our Managed Services customers….

  • Access to a number of documentation sources such AWS Docs, HIPAA and PCI requirements.
  • ChitChat has the ability to create architecture diagrams, step by step workflow diagrams
  • Access to tools like Email so you can say “write me a step by step workflow and email it to Joe”.
  • Integrates with Innovative NOC and SOC teams so you can directly open tickets summarizing your conversation or need for assistance.

Over time, we plan to build out multiple integrations with other Innovative Managed Services technologies such as monitoring systems, CI/CD pipelines and more. Creating connective tissue for our customers in one package.

Give Tailwinds ChitChat a try

 

A Trusted Ally in Your Digital Voyage

As an organization evolves their of AI and BI objectives, Innovative MDS becomes an integral part of your team.

Innovative views this new offering as a partnership that empowers SMBs and startups to harness the full potential of Generative AI without the overhead of managing complex data infrastructures.

It’s a commitment to enabling growth, fostering innovation, and ensuring that our clients are not just keeping pace with the advances in AI and data analytics, but are setting the pace themselves. Join us as we embark on this exciting journey, redefining the possibilities for businesses in the AI era.

Contact us for more information

 

Learn more about our Generative AI service, Tailwinds

Tailwinds Powered by Anthropic

Fusing state-of-the-art AI technology and innovative machine learning, Tailwinds transforms your data into actionable insights, accelerating your digital transformation journey.  Learn more

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Innovative Solutions Launches Tailwinds on AWS

New offering allows businesses to build AI applications with AWS and Anthropic’s Claude

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (July 26, 2023) – Innovative Solutions, a leading provider of cloud services for growing businesses, announced today that it has launched its Tailwinds product on the Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) marketplace. Built by Innovative and based upon technologies from both AWS and Anthropic, Tailwinds allows business leaders and software engineers to use generative AI technology within their applications without the complexity, high cost, and time associated with traditional software development. This new tool enables small to midsize businesses to seamlessly adopt AI technologies in their applications.

“We’re proud to introduce Tailwinds to the market,” said Travis Rehl, SVP of Product and Service at Innovative Solutions. “We’re pioneering a path to make generative AI accessible and efficient for all businesses, empowering them to enrich their products, services, and workflows without the need for deep AI expertise. Tailwinds is the easy button for building apps with generative AI.”

Tailwinds includes three components that application developers and product managers can use to accelerate product development using AI technology: (1) a comprehensive, plug-and-play reference architecture, based on Infrastructure as Code; (2) an API library for utilizing Anthropic and AWS’s AI technologies; and (3) a serverless environment for testing and sharing use case examples during the development process.

Scott Burklund, CIO of Preverity, a company that helps healthcare businesses and technology companies manage, analyze, and model healthcare data, is one of Innovative’s first customers on the platform: “Leveraging Tailwinds is a game-changer for us at Preverity. We’re thrilled to unlock new opportunities by integrating this Innovative’s AI solution into our data analysis processes. With Tailwinds, we’ll use AI to support our growth and deliver even more value to our clients.”

Anthropic, the creators of the generative AI technology named Claude, and Innovative have partnered to support Anthropic’s Claud AI technology on AWS, bridging the technology gap for companies looking to leverage generative AI without the hurdles of integrating the technology themselves. Tailwinds is targeted specifically at HealthTech, FinTech, Manufacturing, and SaaS companies.

“Innovative Solutions, one of our first Generative AI Partners, has indexed heavily on customer obsession and is focused on guiding our customers along an AI Journey that will deliver them transformational outcomes,” said Chris Sullivan, General Manager World Wide System Integrators at AWS. “They have leveraged Amazon Bedrock, and other cutting edge AWS technologies, and brought to market Tailwinds. Like Amazon, Innovative Solutions is democratizing gen Ai, making it accessible to companies without the requirement for deep technical resources and elevated costs. More and more customers will now be able to take advantage of this transformational technology.”

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Innovative believes that every company will become a technology company, and we’re here to help. Recognized as an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner. With an army of cloud experts and the Innovative Cloud Runbook utilizing leading cloud technologies, Innovative gives businesses of every size the confidence to grow in the cloud with generative AI, application modernization, cloud migrations, AWS cloud hosting and resale, managed cloud services, cloud cost optimization, cloud security monitoring, and IT consulting.

Learn more about Tailwinds

Tailwinds Assessment

Tailwinds Assessment helps organizations develop a comprehensive strategy to successfully adopt and implement Generative AI technologies.

Learn More

Tailwinds OnRamp

Create a best-practice Generative AI solution with all the tools you need and quickly integrate it into your business

Learn More

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Innovative Solutions Signs Strategic Agreement with AWS

New agreement supports Innovative’s growth as cloud migration and management experts.

ROCHESTER, NY, January 3, 2023 – Innovative Solutions (Innovative), a leading provider of cloud services for growing businesses, announced today that it has entered into a multi-year strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS). As a result of this collaboration, Innovative Solutions and AWS will tightly align their sales, marketing, and delivery teams to effectively accelerate the adoption of cloud services in the small- and medium-sized business (SMB) and startup industry segments with a key focus on software, fintech, life sciences, and retail industries. Innovative will enhance their customer’s cloud journey experience through managed services offerings as well as the company’s ability to support customers through the full digital transformation lifecycle; migration, modernization, data strategy, and machine learning (ML).

Justin Copie

“We’re thrilled to work with AWS on this remarkable opportunity,” said Justin Copie, CEO of Innovative. “This SCA helps us achieve our vision of helping every SMB customer become a technology company. The size and scale of this agreement, and how it will help us accelerate, is without precedent.”

The agreement between Innovative and AWS drives key investments in several areas that address the growing demand for AWS products and services across Innovative’s base of 600+ SMB customers, as well as with new customers in US and Canada. Innovative will expand their migration and modernization practice, managed services offerings and build out new practices in data analytics and ML to support the advanced stages of its customers’ journey to the cloud. Innovative will also invest in the development and scale of its portfolio, listing the company’s solutions in AWS Marketplace to help SMB customers quickly procure and further accelerate migration to AWS.

Separate from the agreement, to meet growing demand for cloud expertise and helping businesses achieve their objectives with technology, Innovative expects to hire more than 200 additional employees in the next four years.

Jaime Eisenhauer

“Talent acquisition and growth is a central part of our strategy,” said Jaime Eisenhauer, Chief People Officer at Innovative. “We provide our customers with proven experts, so we have aligned both our recruiting and training programs to provide our services with the best talent in North America. It starts with a solid foundation, and every employee at Innovative – from administrative support to accounting to sales to the executive team – has earned an AWS certification.  From there, we go deep with AWS Solutions Architects, DevOps engineers, and specialties that match the needs of our customers.  Working at Innovative is like getting a graduate degree in the cloud.”

As an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner, Innovative has rapidly expanded by adding specialized services for businesses wishing to migrate their server infrastructure to AWS and managing a customer’s cloud operations thereafter. With this new agreement, Innovative Solutions plans to accelerate growth and customer satisfaction by creating four practice groups: Migrations, Modernization, Data Engagements, and Machine Learning. Each will serve as their own lines of business and be responsible for increasing the depth, scale, agility, and reach to provide the best customer experience to Innovative and AWS’s mutual customers at all stages in their digital transformation.

Kevin McGrath

“Innovative’s growth and strategic relationship with AWS is a testament to the quality of service they provide their customers,” said Kevin McGrath, vice president and general manager of Spot by NetApp. “NetApp is proud to be working with successful service providers like Innovative to together help our joint customers take full advantage of the power of AWS.”

Innovative’s growth plans include the expansion of its Managed Cloud Services (MCS) line of business. MCS customers are more confident when growing on the cloud because their infrastructure is managed for cost, security, and compliance with a combination of tools and services. One foundational capability included for all MCS customers, at no additional charge, is CloudCheckr, a cloud management product in Spot by NetApp’s portfolio for cloud operations. In concert with Innovative’s cloud experts, CloudCheckr provides visibility and intelligence to better manage costs, make infrastructure more secure and in compliance, and optimize resources in use.

Ruba Borno

“Over the last 24 months, we have seen a significant rise in demand and adoption of cloud solutions as small and medium size business businesses look to grow their digital offerings,” said Ruba Borno, vice president of Worldwide Channels & Alliances at AWS. “We are excited to expand our relationship with Innovative Solutions and help businesses broaden their customer base and bring new products to market and continue on their cloud migration journey.”

Next year, Innovative is on track to continue hiring and opening offices in both the United States and Canada while remaining headquartered in Rochester, New York, where it was founded. As part of its commitment to the regional economies of its offices, Innovative recently announced that the Rochester Red Wings will now play at Innovative Field, with more investments expected in the future in other regions as well.

Contact us for more information

 

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Innovative believes that every company will become a technology company. Innovative uses its cloud expertise and technology to help businesses migrate to and manage their IT infrastructure in the cloud. With an army of experts and the Innovative Cloud Runbook utilizing the leading platforms and technologies, Innovative gives businesses of every size the confidence to grow in the cloud.

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Innovative Solutions achieves the new AWS Networking Competency

Growing businesses throughout the United States and Canada look to Innovative Solutions as a trusted AWS Partner, and now Innovative Solutions is one of the first AWS Partners to achieve the new AWS Networking Competency.

ROCHESTER, NY — October 18, 2021 — Innovative Solutions, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Consulting Partner, announced today that they have earned their AWS Networking Competency. This designation showcases that Innovative Solutions has the technical knowledge and real-world experience to optimally implement and manage AWS networking technologies.

AWS networking services help customers securely connect to AWS from public or private clouds, group and distribute their applications across Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and additional AWS services and improve their digital experience by providing tools for network performance and monitoring.

The AWS Networking Competency was created to help customers easily and confidently engage highly specialized AWS Consulting Partners that can develop and implement solutions in the areas of network connectivity, network visibility, and hybrid networks. The AWS Networking Competency takes on the heavy lifting of identifying and validating industry leaders with proven customer success and technical proficiency.

Achieving the AWS Networking Competency differentiates Innovative Solutions as an AWS Premier Consulting Partner with deep domain expertise in solutions that:

  • Offers new ways of routing traffic through private backbones and cloud cores
  • Provides secure ingress to mitigate latency
  • Improves availability and enhances application experiences
  • Provides visibility and control in cloud networking


“In our 32 years of business we’ve architected, designed, and implemented literally thousands of networks supporting millions of devices,” said Justin Copie, Owner and CEO at Innovative Solutions. “That 32 years of experience coupled with our team’s ability to help small to mid-size business customers leverage the power of the cloud, is exactly why we’re in such a unique position to deliver innovative networked solutions on AWS.”

Innovative Solutions AWS Networking Competency

Learn more about Innovative Solutions

Innovative believes that every company will become a technology company, and we’re here to help. With an army of cloud experts and the Innovative Cloud Runbook utilizing leading cloud technologies, Innovative gives businesses of every size the confidence to grow in the cloud with Well Architected reviews, cloud migrations, managed cloud services, application modernization, cloud-native software development, cloud cost optimization, cloud security monitoring, and virtual CIO and CISO consulting.

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AWS Well-Architected Framework: What It Can Do For You

What Is The AWS Well-Architected Framework

If you’re thinking about building your company’s future in the AWS cloud, then you’ll want to make sure that your cloud resources and infrastructure are architected as safely, efficiently, and as cost effective as possible.

The good news for cloud architects is that there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Amazon has put together a series of best practices designed to provide objective guidance to those architecting on AWS.

The Well-Architected Framework contains five pillars which guide those building in AWS on how to ensure that their cloud is cost and performance optimized. The framework refers to a series of best practices that should be followed by experts when building their cloud environment.

Unlike many other AWS resources, it does not refer to a series of checks that can be initiated programmatically. Therefore, clients that wish to make sure that their workloads are architected in a manner compliant with the Framework (and which may not have the expertise to do this in-house) should engage the services of an external party (like Innovative’s Well Architected Review service).

 

Well-Architected Framework Pillars

The Well-Architected Framework contains five pillars. An AWS Premier Consulting Partner, like Innovative, follows an AWS Well-Architected Framework checklist to make sure that your cloud can be better aligned to best practices.

Operational Excellence

When migrating workloads to the cloud, it’s key to ensure that they are running efficiently. This means, for instance, avoiding duplication of resources. Or, if servers run at variable capacities, making sure that servers are configured with elastic resources, or take advantage of auto-scaling.

Additionally, those architecting in AWS should frequently refine their operations and build for failure, using practices such as regular game days to test workloads, ensuring that there are plans in place to failover key resources in a DR scenario, and ensuring that their organization culture supports a strong cloud presence.

Security

AWS cloud environments should be architected to protect data, systems, and assets and to take advantage of cloud technologies to improve security.  Best security practices include:

  • Applying security at every layer of the cloud: this can include ensuring that the VPC, subnets, and related resources are configured correctly; ensuring that network access control (NACL) policies are appropriately set; and granting the least amount of permissions possible for every user to do their job.
  • Audit and traceability: making sure that appropriate audit and logs are configured in the cloud. Users should also centralize identity management and ensure that users are not encouraged to use static credentials over the long term.

Reliability

This pillar calls for AWS cloud architects to ensure that their cloud is performing reliably and consistently.  Well-architected workloads should be able to:

  • Automatically recover from failure of components
  • Scale horizontally or vertically as needed.

Additionally, infrastructure changes should be handled by automation rather than being deployed manually.

Performance Efficiency

Performance efficiency means using cloud resources in a way that meets system requirements as efficiently as possible.

When an AWS Partner, like Innovative, applies this pillar of the Framework to clients’ cloud environments, they will:

  • Ensure that global resources are being used where reasonable. These reduce latency for end users resulting in faster performance.
  • Ensure that serverless architectures are being employed where possible. Serverless architectures means that architects do not need to manually provision infrastructure and can instead configure automation that provides capacity as workload requirements evolve.

Cost Optimization

Of course, users should also ensure that their cloud workloads are being run as cheaply as possible. Users should:

  • Measure the overall efficiency of their cloud.
  • Avoid paying for resources when they are not required.
  • Ensure that they are following cost optimization guidelines and aware of the components of the AWS cloud for tracking budget.

 

Why Get A Well-Architected Review?

The AWS cloud can save your organization time and money, all while boosting efficiency. While migrating from on-premises to a cloud-first environment will do the same, users might not be able to tap into the maximum advantages of the AWS cloud until they ensure that their architecture is compliant with the Well-Architected Framework.

 

Schedule a Well-Architected Review with Innovative

During Innovative’s Well-Architected Review, an AWS expert will review the client’s desired workload, assessing it against the Well-Architected Framework, and make recommendations.

As an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, Innovative’s team of experts can then take time providing hands-on optimizations to ensure that clients’ cloud infrastructure are in line with best practices.

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Innovative Solutions Launches Cutting Edge Managed Service Offerings for Amazon Web Services Customers

Best in class managed services align to the needs of growing cloud businesses.

ROCHESTER, NY, April 5, 2021 – Innovative Solutions, a leading Amazon Web Services Premier Consulting Partner, announced today the launch of three new AWS Managed Cloud Services offerings. Unlike alternatives, these offerings are focused on providing customers with choices that fit their business needs as they leverage cloud-based services. Backed by a team of 100% AWS certified cloud experts, small and medium-sized businesses can select the cloud support offering that aligns to their business needs.

Starting today, the three new offerings from Innovative Solutions are:

Innovative MCS Tier Offerings

The three managed service offerings include access to curated technology and tools that are fully integrated into AWS, including:

  • The Innovative iNOC for 24 x 7 x 365 support
  • New Relic, for application performance monitoring
  • CloudCheckr, for cost analytics, cost savings and optimization, security, and compliance
  • Cloud Storage Security, for cloud storage antivirus scanning
  • SecureCloudDB, for cloud database security monitoring
  • Skeddly, for cloud automation
  • PagerDuty, for alerting and escalations
  • Emergency cloud engineering support
Learn more about all three new offerings

 

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Innovative Solutions believes that every company is a technology company. As the fastest growing AWS Premier Partner, Innovative Solutions helps customers in more than 240 cities throughout North America. With an army of cloud experts leveraging the Innovative Cloud RunbookTM, Innovative Solutions gives businesses of every size the confidence to grow in the cloud.

Justin Copie

Justin Copie, CEO

“Managing a cloud environment is complicated. Our entire business is designed to lessen the burden on the business owner’s shoulders and help them recognize the power of the cloud. Managed Cloud Services are the number one enabler to achieving this goal. More businesses have selected AWS than any other cloud provider, and hundreds of small and medium-sized businesses are selecting Innovative Solutions as their partner of choice to help them buy, optimize, and secure their AWS environments in the cloud.”

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Top 6 Ways to Reposition Your IT Systems


In most companies, corporate strategies are owned by the business, along with the necessary funding to fulfill that strategy. Business owns the associated requirement definitions that will execute the strategy. Corporate IT departments are there to implement solutions that satisfy those business requirements. Typically however, business stakeholders lack IT knowledge; they ‘own’ the requirements and the data those requirements produce, but it is IT that provides the solutions that leverage technology that creates that data; the business doesn’t always know what to ask IT for as they don’t understand the possibilities. Very often, these two groups do not necessarily work well together with IT feeling that they are simply ‘order takers’; not being seen as true partners of the business. Therefore, it is imperative for the fulfillment of any corporate strategy in a fiscally efficient way for these two groups to work very closely together to completely understand how leveraging technology can drive strategies forward.

Migrate your infrastructure to a cloud platform

Legacy IT departments create on-premise infrastructure solutions to support all of their IT needs. These solutions may be implemented across multiple physical locations and require very large investments in hardware and software to support a wide area network. This configuration can create many potential issues around backing up data, replicating data, security, etc. With very sophisticated cloud platforms (i.e. AWS) today, companies are migrating their on-premise solutions to the cloud and seeing immediate savings in their TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) expenditures, just by stabilizing their existing systems on a new cloud-based platform. Additionally, cloud migrations are highly-secure and offer tremendous flexibility in storage requirements that provide immediate scalability as companies grow and expand their offerings and geographies.

Use of Data

Business applications typically produce massive amounts of data, based on their requirements. The data is not ‘owned’ by IT, but rather by the requirement owners: the business stakeholders. The ability for Business stakeholders to understand this data and what it tells them is absolutely key to leveraging technology, creating scalability and driving meaningful business strategies that enhance customer experience and improve profitability. Understanding their data can lead to more effective change management, delivering solution improvements more quickly and saving on costs overall. Many business stakeholders do not understand the data that they are producing and lack user-friendly, efficient tools to help them analyze this data effectively. It is imperative that the business uses the necessary time and resources to accomplish this, as it will directly lead to long-term improvements and cost savings for the enterprise as a whole.

Use of the ‘Right’ Metrics – Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Understanding their data allows business stakeholders to determine what are the leading indicators that drive their business. Many businesses look at their data to determine how they have performed over a recent historical period. This data is considered to be ‘Lag’ data in that it only shows what has already happened, and by itself, is not predictive of future results. Companies that understand their data quickly start focusing in on those data elements that are predictive or are ‘Leading’ indicators of future results. Those metrics allow companies to see well in advance how they are performing and if they are going to achieve their goals. In this way, they may have the ability to make adjustments along they way, possibly ensuring a better result.

Business Process Improvements

Many companies stifle their ability to scale and grow by not addressing ever-green improvements to their business processes. As an example, companies will continue to add employees to handle increased workloads of emails and phone calls, both internal and external facing, based on siloed business processes. It may be very advantageous for them to look at their business processes end to end to see if a Case Management solution could drastically decrease the number of necessary communications. The resulting Return on Investment (ROI) could be very substantial. Leveraging technology to satisfy business process requirements should be periodically evaluated, as new and more efficient technologies are appearing more frequently, each having potentially large ROI.

Have a Digital Strategy Roadmap

Any business to business or business to consumer strategy today should be moving toward digitalization. Having easy to access and use web-based solutions that allow for maximum self-service capability is essential for continued growth. Reducing more traditional methods of interacting with all customers (i.e. email, paper, phone, etc.) should be a priority in all technical and business roadmap strategies. The resulting improvements in revenue growth and customer satisfaction far exceed the cost of implementing a digital strategy.

Strategy Roadmap

Most important to repositioning IT platforms is to maintain alignment with corporate long-term strategies as closely as possible. Most large scale enterprise solutions require very long Discoveries in months and potentially another year to implement. Not understanding the over-arching corporate direction and timings can make the leveraging of technology to support them almost impossible. IT organizations should be at the corporate strategy table, providing possible solutions and time tables for the most important strategy implementations. Solutions should not be implemented that do not directly support and further the corporate strategy.

 

Not sure where to get started?

Start building your strategy roadmap with Innovative today by booking a NO CHARGE 2-hour consulting engagement with one of our Certified Cloud Solution Architects.

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Is an AWS Well-Architected Review right for you?

Do you ever wonder if you’re realizing the full benefits of your IT Infrastructure? Is your current infrastructure built in a way that will help to achieve your business and technical outcomes? The AWS  Well-Architected Framework can help your company create a more efficient and effective IT infrastructure, even if it’s not in an AWS environment.

The best way to ensure your workload is meeting best practices and understand the business impact of your architecture is through a Well-Architected Review (WAR). A WAR uses the Well-Architected Framework as a guideline to ensure you are building a secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for your applications, so you can focus on scaling your business while your infrastructure scales with it.

You may be wondering, “Is it even worth it to perform a Well-Architected Review on my architecture?” You could easily spend countless business hours trying to understand if the WAR is right for you, but we will simplify this process by breaking down the four most common scenarios that we have seen while conducting WAR’s for our customers. This way you can make this valuable decision sooner rather than later.

Is an AWS Well-Architected Review Right For You?

Choosing to do an AWS Well-Architected Review boils down to two factors. The intricacy of your workload and the depth of your AWS knowledge and expertise are two factors that create four common situations that your company may fall into. Each situation has its own outlook on whether you should follow through with a WAR.

Relatively Simple Workload, Little to Zero AWS Knowledge

In this category, customers may be using some of the most common AWS Services (i.e. EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, etc.), have a lower AWS spend, and have very few complexities to meet their infrastructure needs. If you have a simple workload and do not spend a substantial amount of your IT budget on your AWS workload, it’s not the end of the world if you don’t go through a WAR. Nonetheless, if you have plans to scale your infrastructure soon or do not know if your architecture is set up to optimize costs, you may still see a benefit from a WAR.

Relatively Simple Workload, Deep AWS Expertise

Businesses with relatively simple workloads and a higher knowledge of AWS do not necessarily need to consider a WAR. Although WAR’s provide substantial benefits, your internal team may have the expertise needed to conduct one yourself using the free documentation that AWS provides to the public. There is always an opportunity to find value in a WAR, but if you have confidence in your own cloud experts and your company’s cloud practice, you might want to keep this work internal.

Highly Complicated Workload, Deep AWS Expertise

In this scenario, your company may have a highly complex workload, but you have an experienced cloud team already in place to manage your infrastructure. In this case, a WAR would be optional. However, receiving a WAR from a WAR-certified AWS Partner Network (APN) partner can provide an extra set of eyes that will help to provide feedback on the architecture your experts have built. Ultimately, if you fall into this bucket, you may decide that your team has everything under control, or you may decide that a second look wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all.

Highly Complicated Workload, Little to Zero AWS Knowledge

Managing a complex infrastructure can be a strenuous process, especially if you don’t have the resources or skillset to handle it. If your company has a complicated workload and you don’t feel you have the know-how to ensure your infrastructure is running efficiently, you would greatly benefit from a WAR. AWS customers in this category commonly struggle to optimize their AWS costs and do not see the full potential of their AWS workload. After helping these customers through a WAR, we often identify other opportunities for our customers to utilize AWS and see additional business value. We recommend these types of customers to take advantage of a WAR, and the findings may be worth their weight in gold.

All in all, a Well-Architected Review is not necessary in every scenario, but they can provide value no matter your business’s situation. Even if you have gone through a WAR within the last year, AWS recommends that these reviews are conducted on a semi-continuous basis to address newer concerns with your architecture.

After reviewing these common scenarios, you may realize you want to conduct a WAR on your infrastructure. You may be thinking, “Who can help me through this process and help me see the benefits of a WAR now?” Good news for you: you have partners that are here to help! AWS has a Well-Architected Partner Program where AWS trains APN Consulting Partners on how to perform Well-Architected reviews. Our company along with others have this certification and we can help you establish good architectural habits, eliminate risk, and respond faster to changes that affect designs, applications, and workloads. If you’re interested in conducting a WAR for your infrastructure, feel free to reach out to us by filling out the form below, or find another partner that will be able to assist you in your needs.

 

Learn more about an AWS WAR

 

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