Amazon VPC's provides a cloud environment that can be private for any company. This means you can have services and servers running in a private environment, isolated from any services on prem. This gives you the capabilities of interconnecting specific services and ports to your internal network.
You are able to keep data in a secure environment where no one can access it without being responsible for the power consumption, cooling of hosts or a disaster recovery scenario. You can avoid any destructive situations. We are using a hybrid infrastructure in our own server room, in combination with cloud instances that we replicate in our zone in a secure way. We use encrypted panels from our premises to Amazon, transferring data and storing it safely.
The best feature is that you can run your servers directly on Amazon's premises, and have access to the internet without Amazon utilizing your own internet connection in your office. You can filter all the traffic and select only the relevant services and network traffic capacitor.
This solution is not fully compatible with every vendor that we use regarding firewalls and networking equipment. They provide you with the option and details on how to configure this on your premises but it would be good to have an easier way to do this.
I have been using this solution for four years.
This is a very stable solution with very little down time.
This is a scalable solution.
Amazon is really hard to contact. Technically, I have not needed their support. On one occasion, we missed emails that referred to a failed payment due to a card cancellation. A couple of months later, our account was suspended and our servers were shut down as a result. It took us four to five hours to figure out how to fulfill the payment and proceed with the account enabling. The support at that time wasn't good. There wasn't a phone number that you could call directly and resolve the issue. We had to open a ticket and wait.
The initial setup can be complex depending on your needs but overall I would say that it is straightforward. From my experience, based on my needs, I can have a server running and VPN connected to our system in about an hour.
This solution is quite expensive.
At the time that we decided to use Amazon, the main competitor was Microsoft Azure. We decided to go with Amazon due to the lack of knowledge on how to do the same things using Azure.
Minor issues that can have a major impact on a company's progress and work, can be prevented by using this solution.
I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.
