Wayne Hayes – Page 4 – Wolk Technology

AWS and Operational Excellence: Organisational Best Practices

The AWS Well-Architected Framework exists to help businesses make their applications and workloads as efficient and secure as possible. It consists of five pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimisation.

The First Pillar

Operational excellence is the first pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. In addition to making sure your workload and applications run smoothly, operational excellence also focuses on making small and reversible changes and dealing with failure.

Operational excellence includes four best practice areas, which are organisation, preparation, operation and evolution. Compliance within all these areas helps your company to succeed and grow.

Organisation

The best practise area of organisation deals with employee structure. It looks at the organisation of your teams and employees in terms of your workload and applications. It’s essential to have a clear structure with clearly defined employee responsibilities and priorities.

Each team should know their position in the company and be aware of how their actions affect other groups and vice versa. You should clearly define the hierarchy of each team to the whole company.

The structure of the workload also needs to be clearly defined. Assign an employee to every application, workload, platform and infrastructure component.

There are a few other steps to follow to help you achieve operational excellence.

1. Evaluate Needs

The first step in the Organisation Best Practice is to identify and evaluate needs, both internal and external. Once identified, you can determine what to prioritise.

External customer needs could involve your stakeholders, important customers or government regulations that impact your business.

Your business, development, or operational teams might have internal needs that could affect your customers.

2. Evaluate Threats

Threats to your business can be anything from other competitors to liability or security risks. Once you’ve found all the dangers, keep track of them in a risk registry. Periodically review the risk registry to determine if it’s possible to mitigate these risks or if they’ve grown in importance.

3. Encourage Experimentation

To encourage growth, build in time for your employees to learn about new techniques and advances in your field. Successful experimentation often results in more efficient practices.

Using the AWS Well-Architected Framework

The AWS Well-Architected Tool helps businesses to implement the Framework. There are also companies that can perform a Well-Architected Review to help you achieve full compliance.

WOLK is an experienced, long-term partner of the AWS Well-Architected Tool who can identify and remediate any high-risk items so you can follow the Organisational Best Practices.

Managing Change With AWS

The AWS (Amazon Web Services) Well-Architected Framework encompasses the five pillars, Operational Excellence, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Security. By following each pillar’s best practices, you can implement designs that will scale with your business.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you mitigate risks, build and deploy architectures faster, and make informed decisions.

AWS Framework and Reliability

The second pillar within the AWS Well-Architected Framework is reliability, which refers to a workload’s ability to perform consistently and correctly. Within the reliability pillar, these are the design principles to keep in mind for best practices:

Automatic failure recovery
Monitoring KPIs (key performance indicators) allows you to be notified immediately if a threshold is crossed or significant change occurs.

Procedures for test recovery
Testing how your workload might fail in the cloud allows you to see your recovery procedures’ effectiveness.

Scale horizontally
Distribute the workload across more small resources to decrease the impact of a single point of failure.

Stop guessing capacity
Accurately monitor demand to avoid over-saturating the workload.

Manage change in automation
Change infrastructure using automation.

Change Management
Change management is a critical aspect of maintaining reliability with AWS. Effectively managing change comes down to monitoring, preparing to adapt and implement the changes.

Monitoring Workload Resources
It’s possible to configure your workload to monitor performance metrics and provide updates if a major event or change occurs. The benefit of accurate performance monitoring is that you can respond quickly when negative changes occur, such as a low-threshold crossing or a system failure.

Monitoring comprises four phases which are generation, aggregation, real-time notification, and storage. In the generation phase, monitoring occurs for all parts of the workload, while aggregation refers to interpreting this data. Real-time processing allows you to have a timely response to changes in data.

The storage phase provides access to past logs for analysis of data on a larger scale. Effective monitoring means you can adapt to changes quickly.

Designing Your Workload to Adapt
You can use AWS services to automate scaling of your workload. A workload must be scalable because this provides flexibility to adapt to changes in function or performance by adding or removing resources.

Implementing Change
Changes that occur in the workload must be intentional. Run tests to ensure you can roll back a deployment at any time without disrupting service to your customers. This includes functional and resiliency testing performed in the pre-production pipeline to determine how changes you implement will impact the system.

Put Trusted IT Infrastructure in Place
AWS cloud-based software offers a scalable IT solution that can grow with your business. WOLK technology is a trusted AWS advanced consulting partner and can advise how best to manage your IT services.

How AWS Helps with Designing Operational Excellence

The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a system that helps build secure and efficient infrastructure in your company’s applications and workloads. It uses five pillars, operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimisation, to streamline your workloads in the cloud.

By completing an AWS Well-Architected Review using WOLK, a Well-Architected Partner, you can ensure your application and workloads are working at their highest potential.

Operational Excellence: The First Pillar

Operational excellence is the first of five pillars in the AWS Well-Architected Framework. In this pillar, the Framework focuses on supporting business objectives, effectively running workloads, learning more about specific operations, and the ability to continue to improve procedures.

Within the pillar are five design principles: Perform operations as code, make frequent, small, reversible changes, refine operations procedures frequently, anticipate failure, and learn from all operational errors. With the AWS Well-Architected Tool, you can discover which of these principles need to be improved.

1. Perform Operations as Code

Performing all operations as code lowers the likelihood of human error from the entire workload. It creates a more streamlined system that can be easily updated and allows a faster response time.

2. Make Frequent, Small, Reversible Changes

Instead of making sweeping changes to fix a problem, the AWS Well-Architected Framework suggests beginning with small, reversible changes. If there is a problem, a small change is easily correctable and costs less time and money to address.

3. Refine Operations Procedures Frequently

Every time your business evolves, so should your operations procedures. Schedule regular meetings to ensure your workload is operating as efficiently as possible.

4. Anticipate Failure

Before starting, plan alternative options. Even after a system is in place, it can fail for many reasons. If your business has backup plans and a response plan in place, you can minimise any negative effects of a failure.

5. Learn from all Operational Failures

Just like a company should anticipate failure, a company should learn from it. Analyse the failure, and create new procedures to protect against it in the future.

Working with a Well-Architected Partner

WOLK is a leading partner of the AWS Well-Architected Program and is fully certified to provide AWS Well-Architected Reviews. After the review, which will highlight high-risk items, WOLK will begin the remediation stage. Typically, most high-risk items can be remediated using your AWS service credit, so your company will not be out of pocket.

The Best 6 Ways to Secure Your Business Information

AWS’s Well-Architected Framework offers comprehensive cloud computing services to businesses through its five pillars.

The second pillar, Security, contains methods for protecting company data, operational systems, and assets through cloud technologies. By utilising the Security pillar’s design principles and best practices, businesses can effectively secure their information with minimal risk.

Security Pillar Design Principles

AWS developed seven design principles to help shape the framework:

1. Create a clear identity foundation
2. Enable traceability across all systems
3. Apply security measures at all system layers (e.g. on all systems, applications, codes etc.)
4. Automate security where possible
5. Protect data in storage and during transfers
6. Eliminate the human role in processing data where possible
7. Prepare for security incidents

Ways to Secure Business Information Through AWS

1. Employ the Best in Practice Security Services

Use AWS services to ensure all aspects of your business information is protected as much as possible. Staying up to date with the latest technologies and recommendations helps keep your intelligence threat level low. Automation, testing, and evaluation provide opportunities to scale.

2. Identity and Access Management

Identity and access management are critical in securing important business information. It makes sure that only authenticated employees can gain access to certain data. This can be managed through an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service.

3. Detection Technology

AWS detection technology, such as CloudTrail logs, allows for processing and auditing various systems, meaning you can detect security breaches or information security threats early.

Log management is key in maintaining a Well-Architected workload, particularly if a security incident occurs. Logs can be analysed and acted on in such scenarios.

4. Infrastructure Protection

Infrastructure protection refers to information security on the cloud and on-premises. It involves AWS native or AWS integrated services that protect, monitor, and log information from points of ingress and egress linked to sensitive business information.

5. Data Protection

Before you can develop any architectural system, fundamental data protection measures should be in place. AWS services can then be used to make data encryption easier, adding further protection.

6. Incident Response

No matter how comprehensive your security systems may be, you should always have an incident response plan in place in case of a security issue. Your company can implement AWS systems to create a fast and effective incident response function.

Tools such as AWS CloudFormation allow you to write or change AWS resources in a safe environment, keeping your information safe.

Act Early to Protect Your Information

As a partner of the AWS Well-Architected Review Program, WOLK can help your business to implement a strong security plan. As a credited reviewer, we can advise you on best practices and services to suit your specific business. Contact us today to arrange a review.

AWS Well-Architected Review: applying the Framework

AWS Well-Architected Reviews use the AWS Well-Architected Framework to provide a consistent approach to evaluate and remediate systems, based on best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems for the cloud.

WOLK is a certified AWS Advanced Well-Architected Partner and is certified to provide AWS Well-Architected Reviews.

What to expect from a review:

– Free Initial Consult.
– No Commitment.
– Leading Partner of the AWS Well-Architected Program.

The process of the AWS Well-Architected Review is to take a specific workload and review it using an approach created to facilitate consistent, considered and excellent process and design. The review takes shape using a three step process:-

1) Learn – Gather information about your workload.
2) Measure – Review your workload with all the right people.
3) Improve – Create recommendations using a statement of works.

Stage 1: The Review

– You grant WOLK read-only access to your account and we complete the review with you.
– We create a document outlining the remediation work the workshop reveals.
– We present the High Risk Items (HRIs) to you along with the Scope of Work (SOW) for sign-off.
– Once signed-off, we allocate time to do the remediation, this typically takes up to two weeks.

Stage 2: The Remediation

– WOLK to complete the remediation work.
– We complete the second milestone of the WAR tool.
– We submit the result to AWS.
– AWS requires that WOLK complete the remediation to qualify for the service credit.

Stage 3: The Service Credit

– You complete AWS feedback review PLUS reply to email.
– AWS grants a service credit to you.
– We can usually complete the WAR and remediate the majority of high risk items within the service credit amount – making the exercise cost neutral to you.

Why use WOLK for your Well-Architected Review?

WOLK are a leader of the AWS Well-Architected Program and have a wealth of experience in reviewing and remediating High Risk Items within your workload. We have developed and maintain tools and unique internal processes that streamline our review and remediation process, reducing the cost and allowing for a cost neutral outcome.

As part of the Well-Architected Process, we highlight the requirement for ongoing measuring and monitoring of your compliance and workloads. WOLK offer a solution in the form of ongoing managed services that are specifically designed around the Well Architected Framework and could include:

– No out-of-pocket expenses for review and remediation.
– AWS spend invoiced monthly.
– Additional account controls or guardrails.
– Simplified and enhanced security features (Single Sign On / SSO).
– Ongoing access to updated tools, processes and monitoring.

The Top 4 Ways to Use AWS to Improve Performance Efficiency

Amazon Web Services (AWS) employs a five pillar framework to guide and assist businesses in adopting continuous best practices through cloud services. You can use these conceptual pillars to improve the performance efficiency of a business.

The Performance Efficiency pillar is most crucial in developing performance. It involves using computing resources to improve the efficiency of a business’ systems and subsequently to sustain efficiency as the market changes and technologies advance.

At WOLK, we are AWS experts. With many years of experience designing complex network architecture, our team can help you leverage AWS to improve the performance efficiency of your business.

1. Allows Your Team to Focus on Core Competencies

Through the design principles of Performance Efficiency, businesses can use technology as a service rather than assigning members of their IT team to the task of learning, hosting, and running new technological services. Technologies such as NoSQL, a database that stores and retrieves data, can fulfil complex tasks quickly and efficiently, allowing members of your team to focus on the core competencies of your business. NoSQLs are used more in big data and real-time applications as they are faster and more flexible than other types of databases.

2. Lower Costs Through Serverless Architectures

Another product of the design principles of Performance Efficiency is the use of serverless architecture. This eliminates the need to operate using physical servers, which can be a tedious and costly operation. By managing services via the cloud, businesses can lower their costs, improving performance efficiency.

3. Optimise Architecture Through Service Selection

There are many types of AWS resources, from standard databases to artificial intelligence (AI) and data lakes. Through these systems, you can create and optimise an architecture to best suit your workload. Organisations can use data analysis software to find the most useful programs for their specific business or industry. AWS Partner Network (APN) suggests architecture selections based on industry knowledge. For example, it may recommend that you use Amazon Elastic Block Store for low-latency block cloud storage.

4. Improve Efficiency Through Innovation

Reviewing and monitoring are two of the best practices of Performance Efficiency. AWS is constantly innovating to meet customer demands. Through new innovative AWS services, regions, edge locations and other features, you can improve performance efficiency. Once you have implemented a new workload, you must monitor it and analyse its performance. AWS services like Amazon CloudWatch can monitor a workload and provide you with information and actionable insights, helping you determine opportunities to improve efficiency.

Get an AWS Well-Architected Review

WOLK is a partner of the AWS Well-Architected Program. With certifications to carry out framework reviews, we can help your business to improve performance efficiency. Contact us today to schedule a review.

How moving to AWS improves security for your entire organisation.

There are many good reasons why so many large organisations have moved their operations to the Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud platform. We touched on a few of them in a previous blog. But possibly the most important benefit AWS offers organisations is a first-rate security framework, security being one of the 5 pillars we’ve touched on before.

The security pillar of AWS is designed to “protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies”.

7 DESIGN PRINCIPLES

The security pillar is based on the following seven design principles:

1) Implement a strong identity foundation: Implement the principle of least privilege and enforce separation of duties with appropriate authorization for each interaction with your AWS resources. Centralize identity management, and aim to eliminate reliance on long-term static credentials.

2) Enable traceability: Monitor, alert, and audit actions and changes to your environment in real time. Integrate log and metric collection with systems to automatically investigate and take action.

3) Apply security at all layers: Apply a defense in depth approach with multiple security controls. Apply to all layers (for example, edge of network, VPC, load balancing, every instance and compute service, operating system, application, and code).

4) Automate security best practices: Automated software-based security mechanisms improve your ability to securely scale more rapidly and cost-effectively. Create secure architectures, including the implementation of controls that are defined and managed as code in version-controlled templates.

5) Protect data in transit and at rest: Classify your data into sensitivity levels and use mechanisms, such as encryption, tokenization, and access control where appropriate.

6) Keep people away from data: Use mechanisms and tools to reduce or eliminate the need for direct access or manual processing of data. This reduces the risk of mishandling or modification and human error when handling sensitive data.

7) Prepare for security events: Prepare for an incident by having incident management and investigation policy and processes that align to your organizational requirements. Run incident response simulations and use tools with automation to increase your speed for detection, investigation, and recovery.

5 FOCUS AREAS

The design principles lay the foundation for the five focus areas of the security pillar:

1) Identity and access management
2) Detective controls
3) Infrastructure protection
4) Data protection
5) Incident response

There is plenty of overlap through these focus areas so it is important to consider how each area can build on or influence others. They should be viewed together as integrated components of your security program rather than individual siloed processes.

Why should all this matter to your organisation?

AWS offers a level of investment and expertise in cloud security that most organisations could not hope to achieve on their own. A few benefits include:

1) The most advanced digital security available.

2) AWS is scalable in every respect, so if there’s a change to your security needs, you can be sure you won’t “outgrow” AWS and need to look for another provider.

3) AWS customers number the tens of thousands, including leading financial organisations and government agencies, so you can be sure that your data is the safest it can be.

Cloud security is top-of-mind for organisations moving their workloads to the cloud or managing an existing application in the cloud. Reviewing an existing or planned application against the principles of the Security Pillar can help you determine what action your organisation needs to take to improve deficiencies and be as secure as possible.

The Ultimate Guide to Enhancing Performance Efficiency

The AWS Well-Architected Framework uses the premise of five operational pillars, Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimisation. The AWS secure cloud services platform provides data storage, content delivery and compute power, among other services that benefit workloads. Using AWS, you can host applications in the cloud and deliver efficient, exciting websites to clients.

The Fourth Pillar
The Performance Efficiency pillar is the fourth pillar of the Well-Architected Framework, and it focuses on the proper allocation of resources to meet system requirements as changes occur.

To understand how to distribute resources for the optimal system response, it’s necessary to understand how the AWS Well-Architected framework functions. Knowledge of the other pillars, particularly Reliability and Cost Optimisation, will be exceptionally helpful in determining how you can use your resources most efficiently.

Improving Performance Efficiency With AWS
To maximise your workload’s performance efficiency using AWS, you must constantly review your selections because of the ever-changing nature of the cloud and newly available features.

To enhance efficiency in the cloud, there are five design principles you can follow:

● Global Deployment
When you deploy your workload to various AWS regions across the globe, you can decrease latency levels and minimise costs for maximum efficiency.

● Make it Accessible
You can make life easier for your team by assigning complex tasks to the cloud vendor instead. The technologies in the cloud become services for your team so they can direct their efforts to developing products.

● Make Use of Serverless Architectures
Going virtual means you no longer have to run and maintain a physical server in one location. Static websites and event services can host your system code, reducing the human power required for the system and minimising expenses.

● Experiment Frequently
Using various types of storage, configurations, and instances, you can execute the system’s frequent testing to see how the workload responds to change, allowing you to plan ahead. Virtual and automated resources make this flexibility possible.

● Understand Cloud Consumption
Having a working knowledge of how cloud content is consumed will help you make more informed decisions that don’t compromise efficiency. When you have knowledge of certain system aspects, you can apply that to your selections to increase storage capability or network function.

Work With a Certified AWS Partner
WOLK is a proud partner of the AWS Well-Architected Framework and is certified to perform system inspections. Using our feedback, you can find out where your system is most vulnerable and make decisions to improve its performance efficiency.

Call us today to schedule an initial review and learn how you can improve your business with AWS.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework’s first pillar, Operational Excellence, is all about ensuring your company runs optimally. To accomplish operational excellence, you can follow the four designated best practice areas of this pillar, organisation, prepare, operate, and evolve.

The first best practice area, organisation, is critical for Operational Excellence because having an organised system makes it easier to identify and solve problems and allows your team to work together seamlessly.

Organisation Helps Your Team Work Better
Knowing exactly what they should be doing at all times helps your team remain consistent and excel at their jobs. Without an organised structure, your team may not know what to do without asking a supervisor, slowing down their pace.

You can also benefit from organised goals. If your team knows your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly goals, they can alert someone if they notice your output falling behind. Additionally, knowing the goals can empower your team to work harder.

Having an organised plan for emergencies can help reduce the damage since you won’t need to spend time devising a way to deal with the problem. If you follow the organisation best practice, your team should know the process for dealing with most contingencies. Ensure you create contingency plans for a variety of problems, including physical ones like a fire in the building or loss of electricity, and virtual ones, like a hacking attempt or a virus in your system.

Ensures You Meet All Regulations
Another significant benefit of following organisational best practices is that you minimise your chances of missing an important deadline or failing to fulfil an industry regulation. Some industries have extensive regulations, from reporting requirements to maintaining certain standards.

Particularly if you operate across national borders, remembering and following all the necessary regulations is challenging. Having an organised structure that tracks deadlines and requirements is essential to keeping your company’s practice aligned with legal requirements. Additionally, you can organise a structure that continues to check for any changes in regulations that could affect your operations.

Work With WOLK to Ensure Your Organisation is Top-Notch
WOLK is an AWS Well-Architected Program Partner and can offer you an AWS Well-Architected Program Review. Starting with an initial, free consultation, we review all your business practices and ensure that you comply with the AWS Well-Architected Program.

We can identify any problem areas and offer solutions, whether you need help organising your structure or improving your cloud security protocols.

Call us today on 03 8669 1414 to learn more about how we can help your company excel with AWS.

Whether you’re working with an internal team or an outsourced consulting partner, the AWS Well-Architected Framework is an educational tool that builds awareness of steps and best practices for architecting for the AWS Cloud.

In our experience, using well-architected best practices and design principles helps you:

Plan for failure

Architecting for failure is one of the primary design principles of Well-Architected. In other words, knowing how to mitigate risk, prevent data loss, eliminate downtime and defend against security threats.

Lower or mitigate risks

Reducing or mitigating risk = minimising surprises. The Well-Architected Framework provides a thorough and comprehensive process establishing options and analyzing your choices as well as for evaluating how a particular decision could impact your business.

Make informed decisions

Specifically, helping you to understand the trade-offs involved in your decisions. Well-Architected workloads gives you choices for responding to changing business requirements or external issues. It also helps you decide the best option by evaluating the trade-offs of every one of your options. As an organisation, you should never feel forced into one option when it comes to improving your workload. The process and questions posed by the Well-Architected Framework can help both your business and technology departments examine all options and identify the route that will lead to the most favourable business impact.

Build and deploy faster

Well-Architected best practices facilitate a DevOps approach that leads to closer collaboration between engineers and business stakeholders, ensuring that your business requirements are aligned with technical goals. This saves time, resources and ensures an integrated approach allowing to build and deploy faster. Taking your business further and faster.