How can Guidance Report for AWS help you make data-driven business decisions?

The world is moving into a post-covid era and a cloud boom is on the horizon. Businesses require a higher return on ROI for every penny invested in a cloud service like AWS. To accomplish this, Site24x7 provides a personalized cloud assistant to attain the most out of your cloud investment. Site24x7's Guidance Report for AWS helps you adopt industry best practices in AWS and make informed decisions.

Challenges for cloud adopters

Cloud adopters face challenges like lack of end-to-end visibility, governance, multi-cloud management, and cloud cost control. CXOs expect holistic recommendations about their cloud deployment and on what aspects those deployments can be optimized or complied. The guidance report examines your AWS services, and effectively identifies resources that don't comply with security, optimization and  compliance standards. This also generates reports based on those identified resources. Site24x7's AWS Guidance Report offers a set of more than 180 best practice recommendations under three different categories: cost, availability, and security.

Cost management  

Cost overrun is one challenge that early adopters or lateral entrants face in the cloud space. The key challenge is not to compromise on performance and critical infrastructure you have subscribed to and, at the same time, have a check and balance on the cost aspect. The Guidance Report identifies idle and unused instances across your AWS account by monitoring resource utilization metrics like CPU, memory, and network traffic, and comparing it with your baseline which is set already.

Let us assume a case where you have many idle AWS Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. The Guidance rReport checks the resource utilization of Amazon EC2 instances and labels them as underutilized if the CPU usage is less than 2% for the past 48 hours. If you are billed based on the instance type and the number of consumed hours, you can lower your costs by identifying and stopping low utilized instances. In addition, the Guidance Report also shows the Current Instance Type and recommends the desired instance type (Suggested Instance Type) that you can downgrade to for better cost-cutting.

Availability and fault tolerance  

You might be aware that AWS systems that house your instances are hosted in high availability data centres. Auto Scaling lets you take advantage of this geographical isolation by enabling you to distribute Auto Scaling groups across multiple Availability Zones (AZ). From AutoScaling and Elastic IP addresses to backups and multiple AZ, a number of options are available to AWS account holders to run their production workload in the cloud hassle-free.

Most of these fault-tolerant mechanisms are little known to you, and most of the users consistently fail to adopt them across their environment. The Guidance Report can help you leverage your fault tolerance mechanism and identify resources that are not used to their full potential. For example, if you want to check for EC2 Auto Scaling groups launching instances in a single AZ, the Guidance Report recommends that you remove the single point of failure to increase the availability of your application.

Security and compliance check

Security violations and compliance risks can be costly for any business that adopts cloud. In a world of blockchains and secure networks, you can't risk your business for a minor security non-compliance. The Guidance Report conducts regular security compliance checks and all these look for any security vulnerabilities to help you analyse if your cloud infrastructure complies with global security and compliance standards. This also enables you to identify the practices that are not compliant and to receive recommendations to comply.

The Guidance Report and business decisions

Data-driven decisions is the buzzword for any business striving to be successful. Let's suppose, a CSP is subscribed to AWS and it is facing overrunning costs and security lapses due to underutilized EC2 instances, unused ELB, Idle RDS instances, IAM roles with full admin privilege, and unauthorized Lambda executions. The Guidance Report gives you a variety of recommendations to fortify against any such security threats, such as exposing TCP ports to minimize vulnerability and managing policies to track invocation permissions. This is what a data-driven business decision looks like.

Site24x7's Guidance Report for AWS is available for all Site24x7 subscription holders, both paid and eval users. If you are a current user, enable access either via IAM user creation or cross-account IAM role and connect your AWS account with Site24x7. If you would like to know more, visit our Site24x7 AWS monitoring page.