Starting with AWS is a straightforward process that's accessible to anyone. However, IT departments can unintentionally overlook crucial aspects while configuring their AWS cloud environments. These oversights can result in longer maintenance times or create severe security and financial vulnerabilities, especially in businesses where IT teams are pulled in a dozen different directions all at once.
As an AWS consultancy with years of experience under our belts, we offer a no cost, no obligation 6-point AWS inspection designed to help small and medium sized businesses. The 6-points we evaluate a business on are:
- Security
- Cost
- Reliability
- Performance
- Operations
- Sustainability
Ready for your AWS 6-point inspection? Contact us or email us at hello@metaltoad.com and our sales team will be more than happy to assist you.
What do we find when we conduct these inspections? All kinds of things. Here are some of the most common:
Security Gaps
- Improper Security Group setup
- IAM roles left open
- Improper VPN design and exposed databases
- Services setup to use the root user
Cost Overruns
- No billing alerts set up, which means no cost controls
- Poor cost optimization.
- Using the wrong AWS services causing overspending
Performance Issues
- Using the wrong AWS services causing performance issues
- Not understanding how to do logging/auditing to properly assess performance
- Not understanding good industry benchmarks for performance
Reliability Issues
- Backups non-existent or not tested
- Lack of 24/7 monitoring
- Using the wrong AWS services causing reliability issues
- Not understanding how to do logging/auditing to determine how reliable a service is
Operational Gaps
- Building it by hand in the console instead of using Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
- Using a 3rd party CDN and CloudFront in line with one another
- Not using some sort of CICD pipeline
Sustainability Misses
- All overspending on the cloud isn’t just a cost issue, but creates unnecessary environmental impacts
- Old physical hardware uses electricity much less efficiently than cloud resources
A well-architected foundation
The Metal Toad 6-point inspection is built on the AWS Well-Architected Framework with small and medium-sized businesses in mind. That’s why security comes first, followed by cost. The AWS Well-Architected Framework is designed to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of choices made during the development of AWS systems, but can also be used successfully as a foundation to assess an environment that is already set up. The framework makes sure we are bringing architectural best practices for creating and managing secure, dependable, efficient, budget-friendly, and sustainable workloads within the AWS Cloud. At its core, we firmly believe that employing well-architected systems considerably enhances the probability of achieving business success, and conducting a full-fledged AWS Well-Architected review is also an option, even for a small business.
Not ready yet?
For more information on the problems we most frequently and how to address them, see our post on the Top 10 things IT departments miss when setting up AWS themselves.