One key area of focus for organizations engaged in education, charitable causes or public sector work is cost. And this is often the primary reason they opt to move their Microsoft workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS). But in the process they also gain from the many improvements AWS offers, via services that support myriads of applications, systems & solutions.

Organizations that run customer-facing applications on the AWS Cloud, delivering software solutions, have leveraged AWS to shorten backup times significantly using Microsoft SQL Server on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Not only are the backups to the cloud radically faster, they offer equally high cost savings. Organizations also also seeing enhanced application availability in running mission-critical applications.

Organizations can also use Amazon EC2 instances for ephemeral storage of SQL Server databases in clusters across various Availability Zones. This ability to cluster across multiple availability zones provides enhanced application availability.

Enterprises that provide educational solutions in the form of content, tools, and services are also learning the advantages of using AWS services to facilitate instruction & learning. For instance, digital applications that can be used by educators to customize courses that improve student’s learning experience. Not only are these enterprises finding it easier to increase capacity to support many more users they can also release new application-features faster, and cost effectively. Migration of such applications to AWS Cloud can be executed painlessly through AWS services such as Amazon EC2 for Windows and Linux in front of Amazon EBS storage volume; Amazon S3 for static content storage, and Amazon CloudFront as its CDN for global content delivery.

Organizations that provide enterprise software for professional services businesses, government departments, project-based businesses, etc. can benefit greatly in terms of reduced costs and enhanced efficiency, as well as, a surprising ease of licence compliances.. Many of Microsoft business applications—such as SharePoint, Exchange, Windows Server, SQL Server, and RDP—can be made to run together. Organizations find that in using AWS Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances,  they can bring their own  SQL Server licenses to AWS and comply with Microsoft’s terms of use.

It’s also a big boost in confidence for an enterprise’s own customers that AWS has earned several industry specific accreditations, including Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), SOC, among others,

When IATA, the International Air Transport Association for airlines across the world, needed to boost performance of its business intelligence (BI) platform, they found their answer in AWS. For starters, AWS’s ISO 27001 Certification allowed IATA to keep its information confidential.

Following the migration of its BP platform to AWS, IATA built a new intranet on AWS. The intranet, which runs Microsoft SharePoint 2013 and NewsGator/Sitrion, offers social networking features for the organization’s users.The solutions are run on Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), which is fully integrated with the organization’s existing Microsoft Active Directory service.

Using AWS allowed IATA to provide its customers with higher business value through enahnced capabilities that traditional solutions just wouldn’t be able to deliver.  For instance, IATA is now able to take terabytes of data into storage without prior capacity planning, and process it quickly.

AWS customers are finding that with AWS vast stable of features and services, there is a feature or more that delivers value for every aspect of any project.  So, while customers may move their Microsofts workloads to AWS for economic reasons, it is AWS’s spread and depth, reach and availability, with sustained pace of innovation that provides value-added benefits.