One of the best ways to create modern, robust, and efficient technology solutions is through cloud services. Cloud-based services allow you to quickly and easily add or remove features as needed. This makes it easier to scale up or down depending on your company's needs. Plus, because the services are provided off-site, they are less likely to be affected by any local problems that may arise.

For businesses that operate in multiple locations, it's important to make sure the technology infrastructure is hyper-connected. By connecting all your data and services, you can ensure everyone has access to the same information independent of physical location. This will also allow you to promptly respond to changes or problems across all your locations. Cloud delivers secure remote connectivity easily by storing all your resources in the cloud which is a global network prebuilt for remote connectivity.

BeCloud recently built a serverless web application for a customer.  This solution had several components that contributed to its success for end users.  First it utilized AWS S3 to host the website front-end. AWS S3 is designed for 99.99% availability.  In addition, S3 is infinitely scalable and resistant to denial-of-service attacks with no servers to maintain. It is even backed by Amazon's S3 Service Level Agreement.

So, the BeCloud solution was built to be available, but it's also important to consider the technology's total cost of ownership (TCO). With cloud-based services, you only pay for what you use. This makes it much easier to budget for technology expenses and ensures that your business isn't spending money unnecessarily. It also helps reduce the risk of wasting resources on unused features or redundancies in the system.

That is why our application additionally utilizes API Gateway. API Gateway is the front door for our application configured to provide additional security.  It also enables easy connection and integration with other applications or future extensions like mobile applications. All this functionality with no servers to manage or backup further decreases maintenance cost or the total cost of ownership (TCO).

Lambda was used to further decrease the cost associated with this application implementation. Instead of having a server running all the time to handle application functions the customer only pays when someone accesses the application.  This was especially important for our use case because the application rarely received traffic at night so nothing was charged during the significant down peaks in traffic.

And finally, DynamoDB was used as the data store because it has no servers to manage and was very responsive to providing data to our application. This database choice will allow for seamless scale up or down to fit future organization needs.

Another key factor when creating a technology infrastructure is data security. You must make sure that your data remains secure from attack or theft. This can be done using encryption, authentication, and other security measures. Additionally, you should have a backup plan in place so that you can quickly and easily restore any lost data. By using a serverless design methodologies as described above implementing security is much easier and can be strengthened as needed.

When technological solutions are not well-maintained you are taking on unnecessary risk. Therefore, it is important to price into your technology stack routine maintenance. If you skip out on that, your infrastructure could easily succumb to an outage that could take an extreme amount of time to repair if not total data loss. One benefit of the serverless design model is that some of the maintenance responsibility is offloaded to the service provider. For example, when utilizing S3 you have a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.99% up time. If this is not reached Amazon credits your account.  Do you have this kind of agreement with servers hosted in your own data center or server closet? Probably not.

We recently were tasked with assisting with the recovery of several web applications for a company. The performance, agility, and maintenance cost we saw from that system which was built on a not so user-friendly content management solution hosted in a private data center reminded us of why cloud hosting is better. The customer thought they had a low-cost system with little maintenance requirements until a catastrophic failure occurred on the web front end server which turned out to be hosted locally on a poorly maintained and woefully documented VMware environment. In addition, the previous IT engineers' poorly designed solution caused several weeks of downtime because even the basics such as passwords were not well documented.

By taking the time to carefully create a technology infrastructure that can quickly adapt to changes in cost, utilization, and features, you can ensure your business is prepared for anything. Utilizing cloud computing, improving security measures, and looking for ways to reduce TCO are all great steps towards creating an infrastructure that will serve your business well. With the right technology in place, you can ensure your business is ready for whatever the future might bring.