AWS Managed Services (AMS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. In general, AWS services offer scalable solutions for computing, storage, databases, analytics, and more. Its unique Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering helps you adopt AWS at scale and operate more efficiently and securely.
Similarly, AWS leverages standard AWS Managed Services and offer guidance and execution of operational best practices — with specialized automations, skills, and experience that are contextual to your environment and applications. AMS provides proactive, preventative, and detective capabilities that raise the operational bar and help reduce any other potential risks.
More so, without constraining agility, allowing you to focus on innovation. For startup businesses, AMS extends your team with various operational capabilities. Including monitoring, incident management, AWS Incident Detection and Response, security, patch, backup, and cost optimization. AMS also enables an enterprise to automate cloud management tasks.
Including but not limited to patch management, change management, provisioning, user access management, incident monitoring, and backup and restores. In other words, AWS Managed Services provides a dedicated Cloud Service Delivery Manager and Enterprise-level AWS Support coverage. But, there is still more to what AWS Managed Services can do!
How AWS Managed Services (AMS) Powers Up Your Cloud Infrastructure
To enumerate, AWS Managed Services is a set of services and tools that automate infrastructure management tasks for Amazon Web Services (AWS) deployments. In general, the service is aimed at large enterprises that want a simplified way to migrate on-premises workloads to the public cloud. And then, help them to manage those workloads after migration.
In most cases, an enterprise follows a series of steps — known as the AWS Managed Services Jumpstart process — to use the service. Part of this process is planning, selecting the applications that will migrate to the public cloud, and then accessing the AWS platform. Onwards, AMS assumes control of a customer’s AWS account as part of the onboarding process.
But still, an administrator can also make change requests for resources through a self-service cloud management console. AWS Managed Services continuously manages a customer’s AWS infrastructure according to best practices set by the Information Technology Infrastructure Library and AWS. AMS heavily relies on APIs so it can power up its cloud services.
For instance, with AMS APIs, businesses can easily integrate their AWS with other development and systems management tools. Not to mention, the seamless AMS service is able to support the likes of Microsoft Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise, and Amazon Linux operating systems. Equally, it can also be used to manage over 20 cloud services on the AWS hub.
Also, AMS customers can even self-provision services for select AWS services that benefit from direct interaction through the AWS Console or APIs. That aside, it’s also worth mentioning that AWS Managed Services provides support in English. On the same note, you can still refer to the region table to see a full list of the regions where AMS is currently available.
The Overall AWS Managed Services (AMS) Benefits You Should Know
Technically, AWS Managed Services (AWS) fast-tracks cloud adoption. In particular, by providing a full range of operational services that augments your infrastructure management capability. So you can support your existing operational processes. You can easily and quickly leverage AWS services and a growing library of automations, configurations, and run books.
AWS Managed Services (AMS) offers monitoring, incident detection, response, and remediation for AWS infrastructure and security incidents. In addition, there is also AWS Incident Detection and Response option — an add-on to Enterprise Support that offers 24×7 proactive monitoring. As well as incident management for subscribed or onboarded workloads.
Essentially, all this is available at no additional charge — in eligible regions for AMS direct customers — with AWS enterprise support. To get started, all you’ll need is to contact your account team — so as to help you subscribe to accounts and onboard your workloads to AWS Incident Detection and Response. There are benefits from an AMS provider for you to consider:
Some of these benefits are:
- Reduced IT workforce operating costs
- Improved data and operational security
- Managed cloud-based infrastructure services
- A simplified application and environment management
- Frictionless innovation with a much faster time-to-market
- Stronger security and regulatory compliance measures
- You’ll have more time to focus on business goals
Forthwith, AMS Accelerate customers can also use AWS Control Tower for free. Especially, so as to deploy and manage their account configurations and landing zones. AWS Control Tower can be used with AWS Managed Services Advanced as long as it is added after AMS creates the initial landing zone. It’s inclusive of networking, logging, and application accounts.
Basically, AWS provides an end-to-end operational solution for both new and existing environments. Not to mention, it also helps in managing other operations for AWS infrastructure too. Including AWS cloud resources running on AWS Outposts deployments on-premises. Refer to the AWS Managed Services Documentation for other support features like;
1. Security
AMS elevates operational excellence with security monitoring and remediation. In fact, it continuously mitigates risk for it’s potential customers at a scale. More so, by leveraging AWS best practices and a wide suite of AWS native tooling. What’s more, the optimal AWS Managed Services safety mechanisms help provide both preventative and detective controls.
2. Availability
In the same fashion, AWS Managed Services helps its customers by providing well-architected reviews, configuration rule checks, risk prevention, management, and more. Suffice it to say, AMS monitors services 24x7x365 with proactive alarms and a complete incident management lifecycle — from detection and response to the resolution.
3. Efficiency
Still, AMS takes an automation-first approach to operations to reduce human error and provide consistency, speed, accuracy, and cost savings. Customers receive an average annual operational cost-saving of 10-15%. Through automation, AWS teams can focus on complex customer problems and continuous improvement mechanisms to achieve customer outcomes.
4. Resiliency
Remarkably, AMS scales its customers’ operational capabilities and evolves to meet their needs and the constantly changing security landscape. For instance, you may consider the AMS operating model in this case. Whereby, it is based on a continuous learning mechanism that evaluates workloads and pipelines against changing security policies.
5. Compliance
Last but not least, AMS offers an accelerated path toward meeting compliance needs. As a matter of fact, AMS has achieved compliance certifications and attestations against PCI-DSS, HIPAA, HiTrust, GDPR, ISO, SOC 1, 2, and 3. One thing is for sure, AMS has also a pre-authorization to operate workloads requiring FedRamp Moderate.
Getting To Know A Few Ways To Use The AWS Managed Services (AMS)
Realistically, AWS Managed Services highly focuses on infrastructure management and creating scale through automation. They work closely with AWS-certified partners in the majority of their customer engagements. Whereby, they fill several critical business areas of the customers’ end-to-end cloud solutions not provided by AWS Managed Services.
Such as migration consulting and application management. Customers looking for a single vendor to provide both application and infrastructure management are encouraged to contact one of their AWS Managed Service Providers. AWS Managed Services is designed to operate through APIs. Whilst, enabling integration of the service into a wide range of solutions.
AMS is designed to help you integrate existing IT Service Management (ITSM) systems and development platforms. They provide a standard integration with ServiceNow for AWS Managed Services Advanced. While, at the same time, AWS Managed Services Accelerate customers can use the AWS ITSM Integration to power up their IT infrastructure management.
Markedly, integrations can be performed by AWS Professional Services or an AWS Managed Services Partner. Be that as it may, AWS Managed Services supports AWS infrastructure and services used in traditional, modernized, and cloud-optimized workloads. The full range of AWS support services includes the operating system on Amazon EC2 instances as well as;
1. Infrastructure Management Tasks Automation
In this case, the AWS Management Console is a web application that comprises a broad collection of service consoles for managing AWS resources. When you first sign in, you see the Console Home page. The home page provides access to each service console and offers a single place to access all the information you need. So as to perform your AWS-related tasks.
On one hand, you can also customize the Console Home page by adding, removing, and rearranging widgets. Such as recently visited, AWS Health, Trusted Advisor, and more. The individual service consoles, on the other hand, offer a wide range of tools for cloud computing. Not forgetting, the basic information about your account as well as your billing.
2. Business Workloads Monitoring & Observability
To establish a strong foundation for securely operating your workloads in the cloud, it is critical to consider how you plan to monitor the health of your workloads. An observable environment reduces risk, increases agility, and improves customer experience. As such, AMS elevates operational excellence with 24x7x365 proactive monitoring of activity and incidents.
So as to ensure availability and resiliency. Through automation, AMS detects and proactively notifies customers of 80% of incidents, increasing as it continues to learn from experience. In simple terms, by leveraging AMS, you can keep your AWS resources focused on innovation instead of undifferentiated operational tasks.
3. Tasks Configuration, Compliance & Auditing
In reality, most organizations operate in a compliance landscape that is complex, dynamic, and evolving rapidly. Whilst, facing internal requirements as well as external industry, national, and international regulations. To help businesses stay active and compliant, AMS offers customers an accelerated path toward meeting compliance certifications and attestations.
Generally, these compliance certifications and attestations help safeguard businesses against PCI-DSS, HIPAA, HiTrust, GDPR, ISO, SOC 1, 2, and 3. AMS helps customers configure their environment to be secure. By providing time-tested safety mechanisms aligned with NIST, 150+ managed guardrails. Plus security checks, and the most up-to-date best practices.
4. Centralized Business Operations Management
Surprisingly, the cloud computing landscape is constantly evolving. Thus, keeping up with new security threats can be time-consuming, costly, and require ample cloud talent. AMS scales its customers’ operational capabilities and constantly evolves to meet their changing needs. After all, the AMS operating model is based on a continuous learning mechanism.
Something that evaluates workloads and pipelines against changing security policies. With every interaction, the AMS team helps iterate and improve customers’ operating models. Specifically, by tuning alarms, creating automations, and adding new monitors and service level indicators.
5. Unlimited Enterprise Governance & Controls
Clearly, to provide transparency in governance, AMS offers metric reports from various native AWS services to summarize its key performance results. Including an executive summary and cost-saving insights, granular details of incidents, and performance. AMS also allows enforcing AMS and non-AMS tags to ensure they comply with enterprise governance.
And also, have some customized auditing control. Eventually, AMS can take over the administration and maintenance of Control Tower environments and offer monitoring and remediation. The best thing is; to interact with AMS services, customers can easily and quickly leverage Developer Mode directly in their Dev Test accounts.
The Best Practices To Help You Work With Its Cloud Automation Tools
In the first place, AWS Managed Services (AMS) meets you where you are in your cloud journey. Meaning, that whether you are considering a move to the cloud, are in the process of migrating, or have workloads running on AWS, AMS can expand your operations capabilities. Secondly, AMS Accelerate works with your existing AWS accounts and workloads.
Plus, it can begin helping you operate quickly — its Advanced AMS Services can also begin helping you right away! More so, with its designated Cloud Service Delivery Manager and Cloud Architect Resources — to help and guide you through your operational planning and decisions making. Operations will begin once they have deployed AMS solutions.
Operations can start powering up things like managed landing zone, or rather, as soon as the first workload has been migrated. AMS offers flexibility in how you interact with AWS resources. Its AMS Accelerate customers can interact with AWS services as they do today. While still leveraging AWS APIs, AWS Console, AWS Command Line Interface, and the like.
Particularly, through the AMS Console, or any existing ISV integrations. AWS Managed Services Advanced customers will interact primarily through the AMS change management platform. Whilst, using AWS CloudFormation Templates and AMS automated requests for change. However, customers can also leverage Developer Mode to interact with AMS services.
Summary Thoughts:
For your information, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers — from the fastest-growing startups, and largest enterprises, to leading government agencies — are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.
This means, that Amazon’s move into the AWS Managed Service provider space is exciting news for many businesses and companies alike — as long as they are committed to AWS environments. For enterprise-grade organizations operating on a single-cloud platform, AWS Managed Services can greatly help them in terms of deploying an efficient AWS environment.
Unfortunately, companies looking to make the move to the cloud or manage a smaller AWS environment will have to look elsewhere for support and services. Because AMS isn’t built to scale down. But, the fact still remains that AWS has the most extensive global cloud infrastructure — its Region and Availability Zone model has even been recognized by Gartner.
Finally, a majority of organizations today are in search of vetted solutions and architectural guidance to rapidly solve business challenges. Whether customers prefer off-the-shelf deployments or customizable architectures, the AWS Solutions Library will sort you. It carries solutions built by AWS and AWS Partners for a broad range of industry and technology use cases.
Answers To AWS & AMS FAQs:
1. How much does AWS Managed Services cost?
AWS Managed Services offers you a pay-as-you-go approach to pricing for cloud services. With AWS you pay only for the individual services you need for as long as you use them. Overall, the AWS Managed Services Pricing is calculated based on the number of instances. As well as the usage fees of all other AWS services within the accounts they manage. For more information on pricing, please contact their sales team to gather more details.
2. What industry standards do AWS Managed Services comply with?
Just like we aforementioned, AWS Managed Services follows Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL*) — the topmost popular IT service management framework used by various enterprises. Many of the underlying AWS services managed by AWS Managed Services are certified. As an example, AWS Managed Services is already certified for HIPAA, HITRUST, GDPR, SOC, ISO, and PCI. You can have a look at AWS and compliance to gather more resourceful information.
3. Does AWS Managed Services manage applications?
AMS specializes in managing AWS infrastructure and services. Whilst, keeping in mind, that AMS does not operate or configure your applications. However, they can still work with application teams to develop application-specific health monitoring — through standard AWS services such as Amazon CloudWatch. For custom and packaged applications, they even have a community of AWS Partners to lean on — who provide application management as part of their portfolio of services.
4. Does AWS Managed Services manage third-party tools?
AWS Managed Services (AMS) manages certain third-party tools as part of the AWS Managed Services Advanced operating plan. Including certain endpoint security, directory services, and network firewall tools. If you have an operational need specific to your tools or environment, we encourage you to contact your sales representative — about Operations on Demand, currently available in the US. Perse, so as to determine if AMS can provide custom operational capabilities or not.
5. How does AWS Support differ from AWS Managed Services?
On one side, AWS Support provides a mix of tools and technology, people, and programs designed to proactively help customers optimize performance, lower costs, and innovate faster. AWS Support addresses requests — that range from answering best practices questions, and guidance on configuration, all the way to break-fix and problem resolution.
AMS, on the other side, helps enterprises adopt AWS at scale and operate more efficiently and securely. They are able to execute operational best practices on behalf of the customer through specialized automations, skills, and experience — all contextual to their environment and applications. Whilst, providing proactive, preventative, and detective capabilities.
In a nutshell, this is something that helps AWS raise the operational bar and help reduce risk without constraining agility. While, at the same time, allowing customers to focus on innovation. By all means, they extend customers’ teams and operational capabilities per demand. Including monitoring, incident detection, security, patching, backup, and cost optimization.
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