Can AWS Continue To Provide For Ecommerce Businesses?

AWS

Ecommerce vendors hosted by AWS have approached the crucial December season with some trepidation. As CNBC highlights, last December saw a huge outage that caused a lot of damage to vendors already hurt by the double jeopardy impact of coronavirus and the world economic downturn. With outages more frequent, questions are being asked of AWS and whether it has the quality, security, and capacity to continue being the best option for ecommerce businesses. As it happens, work ongoing in the third party market and within AWS itself indicates that they remain a strong option.

Managed services

There is a good deal of complexity in the background with AWS, and especially so in the time and money sensitive world of ecommerce. As a result, most businesses do not manage their AWS directly, but instead resort to a trusted partner for managed service provision. With the outages over the past year impacting providers, there has, however, been a general clamor to get closer to the source and have a hands-on management style. While this might see less of a role for managed services, there are actually indications that business owners are leaning more into the expertise offered by third parties. According to VentureBeat, 68% of businesses are planning to make more heavy use of third parties into July 2023. While there’s a little bit of discomfort over outages, turning to third party expertise to get the most quality out of the service will be effective.

Security protections

The outages of the past year have been linked to cyber crime, if not confirmed. Furthermore, the physical attack attempt on a US based data center raised the prospect of physical security. As a result, there have been questions over the security credentials of AWS – especially as, according to Cyber Security Dive, Amazon does not focus on security quite to the same level as competitors. This is, allegedly, because AWS is secure by design; they don’t market on security as it’s inherent. More can be done, however, as there’s always room for improvement – but for the time being, there are few better services, security-wise. That can make difficult reading for ecommerce businesses, but in a pragmatic sense, is perfect

Approaching scale

One area in which there is little question over the ability of AWS to provide is scale. The business has continued to grow in real terms, as TechCrunch highlights, and that comes from providing additional capacity and gaining additional customers. ZDNet announced that, last year, over 100 trillion objects had been stored on AWS. If each object averaged 100kb, that’s a total storage capacity of 90 petabytes – a gargantuan figure. Outages appear to be technical, and AWS will continue to expand to meet the needs of growing ecommerce enterprises.

Have faith in AWS. The service is dominant in the cloud world for a good reason and it’s unlikely that’ll change anytime soon. There are questions over some aspects of the operation but, ultimately, the scene looks sustainable.