11 Reasons Why AWS is the Right Choice of Data & Analytics Platform for Your Business

Cloud computing providers are striving to meet the ever-increasing computing needs worldwide. And the race to the top has narrowed down to three gigantic horses: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Computing (GCP). While all of these have pros and cons of this cloud web services comparison, AWS wins clearly in the most crucial areas.

AWS has continued to accumulate the most experience for almost 15 years now. Read on to understand why this delivers the best cloud computing experience.

Why Is AWS So Popular For Data & Analytics Platform

AWS has become a leading choice for businesses across industries for data and analytics applications. However, the main question arises: why AWS Cloud? Because of its large base of customers, wide range of tools and services, and frequent updates, AWS has demonstrated itself to be a powerful all-around platform for data and analytics workloads. Moreover, it possesses several distinct advantages that cannot be overlooked: scalability, flexibility, and affordability—all of which can help the success and growth of your business.

As a cloud-based platform with massive data storage capabilities and global accessibility, AWS Data Analytics offers a comprehensive suite of services with low operating costs. That's why so many companies have chosen Amazon Web Services as their sole provider; it ticks all the boxes needed when seeking an effective solution for data management or analytics in any field of operation. Therefore if you seek reliable data analytics for business at a reasonable cost, then AWS is worth considering. 

Below are 11 reasons why you should choose the AWS data analytics platform

1. Establishment

Unlike its competitors, AWS is the oldest player that cemented its cloud computing industry experience. Upon its launch in 2006, AWS features many services, including  Simple Storage Services (Amazon S3), Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2), and other solutions. 2009, more services joined the AWS offerings, including Content Delivery Network (CDN), Amazon CloudFront, and Elastic Block Store (EBS).

‍AWS competitors such as Azure and GCP came into business later: 2010 and 2008, respectively. So they’re still gaining experience.

‍2. Availability Zones‍

Being the earliest bird in the game means AWS has had more time to expand its zones. So wherever you are, the probability of AWS hosting in your region is high.

AWS Cloud offers an extensive global footprint, with a presence in 31 geographic regions and 99 Availability Zones. Plans to expand the AWS availability worldwide have been announced, including 15 additional Availability Zones and 5 more AWS Regions in Canada, Israel, New Zealand, Malaysia and Thailand. Whereas, Microsoft Azure operates in 60+ regions, each with a minimum of three availability zones and Google Cloud Platform offers 27 cloud regions and 82 availability zones.

‍3. Market Shares

AWS has been a top leader in the cloud market since its launch. Statista's first quarter 2022 report revealed that AWS holds the majority of the cloud computing market, with 33% of all usage. Azure follows close behind with 22%, and Google Cloud rounds out the top three with a 8% market share.

AWS also serves flagship businesses such as BMW, Zynga, Samsung, MI, Unilever, Airbnb, and Netflix. For such well-known customers to trust this provider, it means they’ve found its services to be top-notch.

According to Bezos, the seven-year head start gave AWS an advantage over the latecomers. So customers are continuing to enjoy the most evolved and robust features plus immense community support.

‍4. Ease of Use

Upon registering to AWS, you get access to their AWS Management Console, a highly user-friendly interface. This server interface presents many services and application of AWS that every business needs.

Whether you’re looking to migrate your software, deploy your SaaS, or host your website, you don’t need incredible IT skills. You can also get access to well-documented web services APIs to help you find your way through the system seamlessly.

On the other hand, GCP’s highly automated, proprietary, and abstracted infrastructure sometimes gives enterprises a headache. And according to Nigel Frank, Azure’s environment is a bit challenging when it comes to operating your resources. Their foundation still needs more work, including developing guidelines to guide users in fundamental principles.

‍5. Pricing

AWS often turns out to be the friendliest vendor pocket-wise in the market. As said earlier, it has existed long enough to command a significant market share, allowing it to enjoy a large business scale. So, providing their services at more affordable prices is easy for them.

Having cemented their position in the market, they’re undoubtedly excellent at attracting more business. This capability means AWS cost can bring in more revenue than GCP and Azure and comfortably reinvest a significant portion into the cloud to provide more robust services at affordable fees.

‍AWS pricing structure is more flexible than Azure, and you can save more money if your usage increases. As you use their services more, the charges tend to go down. You can purchase AWS instances using these pricing models:

• Reserved instances: charges an upfront fee depending on usage. You can reserve an instance for one to three years
• On-demand instances: no upfront cost, just fees for what you use
• Spot instances: depending on the availability of capacity, you can bid for extra capacity
• While Google tries to win customers through deep discounts, the cheap services are not as robust as those of AWS. And since you want to entrust your sensitive resources to an affordable yet experienced provider, it makes sense to go with AWS.

‍6. Services and Features

Being an industry player for more years than its competitors, AWS has evolved its offerings to include more services. And they are by far the most functionality-rich in the industry, thanks to the robust experience.

AWS provides 200+ services, while Azure offers 100+ services. GCP follows behind with only around 60 services.

‍7. Security

As the most dominant and mature provider, AWS has witnessed many hackers’ tactics, acting swiftly to stay ahead of them every time. This experience has resulted in excellent AWS security as a service, tooling, and knowledge resources for its customers.

Also, the AWS platform has built and cemented its scope and maturity over time, allowing users to focus on their business and leave the security part to the company. The platform also provides the ability to default to secure configurations. For instance, when you deploy an instance onto a virtual network, network access restrictions come into play.

It avails the most crucial security functionalities, including security event triggers, API activity monitoring, WAF, threat Intel, vulnerability assessment, and many others. The granular IAM and security groups (firewalls) are some features that make it stand out from the pack.

On the contrary, Azure doesn’t have consistency, and its security documentation is still wanting. And its services often don’t default to secure configurations. GCP is equally disappointing as it’s still gaining experience in this crucial world of cybersecurity.

‍8. Reliability

The cloud platform AWS also wins the game hands down here, having maintained uninterrupted operation without outages for more than 6 years straight. The competitors to AWS, such as GCP and Azure, recently experienced outages, so you will want to remember this before going with these solutions.

AWS’s last outage incident was in February 2017, while Azure went down in May 2019. GCP also had a significant outage in November 2019. Gartner’s comprehensive cloud provider research confirms AWS’s reliability.

‍9. Scalable Data Lakes

AWS Lake Formation simplifies and accelerates data lake management, helping you set up and manage your data lake in days rather than months. Amazon S3 is an ideal place for storing your data lake. Its unmatched durability, high availability, fully compliant AWS security features with audit logging and access control, varied storage tiers, and lower costs make it the ideal choice for any size or type of data lake. Amazon S3 offers strong capabilities in regulating access levels, just as cost management, replication options, and extensive protection against data loss. And all this with pricing starting at less than $1/TB/month - making it an infallible choice when you need reliable cloud storage that works for your business needs!

‍10. Seamless Data Movement

Managing and moving data between your data lakes and purpose-built data stores becomes easy with AWS, enabling organizations to combine, replicate, and migrate their stored data. With the help of AWS Glue's comprehensive integration capabilities, you can easily prepare and combine data for analytics, machine learning, and app development. Moreover, services like Amazon Redshift and Athena provide federated query capabilities that allow users to access multiple data sources without needing ETL pipelines or another data movement. This makes it easy to get key insights from your diverse datasets stored on different platforms.

‍11. Performance And Cost-Effectiveness

AWS goes above and beyond to deliver the best performance while keeping costs low across all its analytics services. In addition, S3 intelligent tiering is designed to save you up to 70% on storage fees for your data lake. Amazon EC2 gives customers access to over 200 instance types with a maximum network bandwidth of 100 billion bits per second (Gbps). 

Amazon Redshift RA3 instances with managed storage allow you to control your performance requirements while keeping costs low. AQUA, Amazon's advanced analytics query accelerator, can accelerate queries up to ten times compared to traditional solutions. AQUA accelerates compression, encryption, and a range of data processing tasks such as scans, aggregates, and filters; this enables Amazon Redshift to perform up to ten times faster when scaling out across many nodes.

‍Wrapping Up

As businesses continue to look for a better data and analytics platform, AWS stands out with its various benefits. This article outlined 11 compelling reasons why you should use AWS for your business needs: scalability, reliability, security, cost-effectiveness and more. Look no further than AWS for your data and analytics solution! Choose AWS to enjoy its expertise and experience built over the years.

Take your data and analytics workloads to the next level by partnering with Agilisium, an AWS-exclusive partner. At Agilisium, we provide clients with a highly dependable, protected and expansive cloud services to explore their business data. Our Analytics Services are designed to help you uncover digital opportunities and use them to create better products and services for your clients. Let's get started today—reach out to us now!