Cloud has revolutionised the way businesses operate, especially when it comes to start-ups. It’s uncommon now to find a start-up that isn’t cloud native; most chose to adopt a cloud infrastructure from the beginning. Businesses such as Monzo, Airbnb and Lyft have been able to grow and innovate quickly, seamlessly underpinned by their highly secure, agile, and flexible cloud infrastructure. Start-ups approach cloud, and more importantly security, with a different viewpoint when compared to larger established organisations who are still struggling to marry together new capabilities with legacy systems.
by: Kamini Aisola
photo: AWS
featured: Kamini Aisola, Country manager Benelux at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
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To bring their ideas to life and scale rapidly, start-ups are taking advantage of numerous benefits and advantages offered by the AWS Cloud, safe in the knowledge that security is not an after-thought, but rather the cornerstone of the entire platform of services and infrastructure.
Smart investments
When starting a business, managing costs is critical, therefore investments that deliver the highest possible value and return on investment (ROI) are a must, so start-ups only pay for the services they use. This approach enables them to avoid the large upfront expense of owned infrastructure, and manage their IT at a lower cost than an on-premises environment.
However, low cost does not mean low functionality. To the contrary, a start-up operating on cloud infrastructure has access to the same services and capabilities as the largest enterprise or government customers. This investment includes entire teams dedicated to security, with over thirteen years’ experience, that satisfy the security and compliance needs of the most risk-sensitive organizations. This allows them to compete on an even playing field, innovating quickly and bringing products to market, all with the knowledge that they have the best security.
Scalability
Start-ups are ambitious, tenacious and hungry to expand, so choosing to build and scale their business on the cloud is a natural choice. Simply by embracing cloud, start-ups can scale rapidly, giving start-ups the ability to add or remove resources to meet evolving business demands as required. Instead of investing in data centres, servers and service level agreements, the cloud allows start-ups to react faster and more flexibly, to experiment, innovate and better serve customers. AWS is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 165 fully featured services from data centres globally, so start-ups can go global in a matter or clicks and support any expansion plans.
Speed and Agility
Cloud platforms provide an opportunity for start-ups to optimise existing IT systems and to increase operational efficiencies, while driving business agility and growth. This is achieved by allowing companies to significantly decrease the time it takes to provision and de-provision IT infrastructure. While a physical server could take months or weeks to procure and provision, a cloud server takes minutes. Furthermore, cloud supports the increasingly rapid pace of product development and the need to swiftly bring products to market by using the services that AWS offers. Start-ups are all about speed and agility, and AWS believes this is exactly what cloud offers.
Security
Start-ups must make security a top priority, regardless of size. A security breach can impact start-ups by hurting their reputation and customer-bases and can have repercussions on the larger organisations these businesses they do business with. With a report from Malwarebytes revealing that cyber-attacks across Europe have soared 235 percent over the last 12 months, start-ups need to bake-in security from the ground up to make sure they are not the weak link in a supply chain.
Security Automation
Time is precious for start-ups and, at AWS, automating security tasks enables start-ups to be more secure by reducing human configuration errors and giving teams more time to work on other tasks critical to the business. Automation can also offer a smarter approach to detecting potential threats through its ability to monitor patterns of behaviour; being able to identify changes in behaviour means potential attacks can be identified and dealt with immediately. Applying machine learning and mathematical logic to security also allows cloud platforms to proactively manage tasks including security assessments, threat detection and policy management. AWS is committed to helping customers achieve the highest levels of security in the cloud. Using automated reasoning technology, the application of mathematical logic to help answer critical questions about your infrastructure, we are able to detect entire classes of misconfigurations that could potentially expose vulnerable data.
From an early stage, start-ups must choose a cloud provider whose network architecture is designed to meet the requirements of the most security-sensitive organisations in the world. At AWS, we believe start-ups are a huge driving force for innovation. However, this wouldn’t be possible without a cloud provider that can support and evolve with them as they grow and that enables them to keep their data safe and protect against malicious attacks. By having a cloud-native approach and putting security at the centre, start-ups can focus on innovating and disrupting their industry, knowing that their cloud platform is as agile, highly secure and dynamic as they are.
