AWS - Why cloud is the best platform for securely managing large data

Editor's Notes

• #2: I am Ninad, I am a Solutions Architect at Amazon, and I think both Ashok and Gopal have covered most of the points that I am going to impress upon you today, around scalability, security. So what advantages, does the cloud have to offer right? that is what my talk is going to be all about. So when Vaultastic was created right, everybody has an option to do it multiple ways, so it could have been done using a traditional data centre and also cloud, so what advantages did the cloud provide compared to traditional infrastructure. In the traditional infrastructure world you have to procure equipment and that means there is a lot of capital cost that is involved, there is a procurement cycle involved, there is a lot of planning you have to do upfront, sizing you have to do upfront. So there is a long process, laborious process to get all this done. Obviously you need the resources to manage and maintain all this infrastructure and equipment that you buy. You will end up into contracts, there will be lease renewals every few years, there will be hardware refreshes every few years, which will be painful and there is a dollar value attached to all this. Coming to the cloud side of it, well, on the cloud there is no upfront expense, so you pay as you go, so as your business grows, you are able to scale your infrastructure and the services that you consume. You improve time right, so you focus on your key strengths, as Gopal rightly said, if I had valuables, I would rather put them in a bank who has the best skills to basically keep my valuables safe rather than engineering a process to keep them safe in house. So it gives you time to focus on your key business areas that you want to focus and leave the heavy lifting of infrastructure management to us. It improves your time to market and your agility. You can scale up and down as you need, so you need not plan your deployment or the sizing may be off by a bit and you always have the ability to scale up and down and everything is self service. You are self reliant, you can simply make an API call or go to the console and provision whatever service you want to basically provision in any part of the world. So that is the advantage that the AWS cloud offers which basically makes solutions like Vaultastic, to choose AWS cloud rather than traditional data centres. Now in the cloud world, why AWS? So why did Mithi choose AWS for Vaultastic? Number one is, that we have been in this business since 2006, in fact Amazon was the company that pioneered the cloud business and we now have more than 10 years of experience, running cloud, add scale that no other provider does. Today we have more than 90 services in various areas, and depth in all these services. We believe in basically creating our products based on customer feedback. So we generally tend to release a minimum viable product and very raplidly iterate on that product based on customer feedback. So you see us releasing a lot of features every year on all these services. So in 2016 we released a total of 1017 new features or services. On an average we release 4 new features or services everyday. That's possible right. We are constantly expanding our global footprint. So as of today we have 16 regions, so you could basically deploy your solution or anything you create in any of these regions with 44 availability zones to choose from across the world. We are a very customer obsessed company and our culture is very similar to the Amazon culture right? So Amazon culture is basically to drive economies of scale, so we do that, and that gives us the ability to reduce prices every year. So we have pro-actively reduced our prices more than 60 times since we started this journey in 2006. Security is number one priority at Amazon and we will cover some of these security aspects later in the presentation. We have the largest partner ecosystem, so company's like Mithi who choose to deploy solutions on us. We also have a large ecosystem of consulting partners who work with customers and partners deploy their solutions on AWS and we understand that everything will not move to the cloud on day one, so we have the richest set of features that helps you deploy applications in a hybrid manner where part of your ecosystem could reside on prem or in a colo facility and part of the ecosystem could be on the cloud. So why was AWS the best fit for Vaultastic? If you are deploying any solution or any product, any where, what are the features that you typically look for. Or what are the attributes of the platform that you will typically look for? You will look for security, high availability, scalability, durability and completeness of the platform. I will catch up on all these aspects in the coming slides, to basically show you how it ticks all the check marks in all these areas. So the first and foremost thing that comes to everybody's mind when it comes to the cloud is security right? How secure is my data? And that is the foundation of an email archival platform right. Just listening to what Gopal was mentioning and the kind of data that goes into email in a pharma company, you could imagine how valuable that data is and you need an extremely secure platform to keep all this data. So on the cloud, basically you have real time visibility and visibility historically into what has been happening on the platform. So you have one place where you can basically see what are all the machines that are running what are all the services you are consuming, so it is not like somebody coming into the office with a personal laptop, hooking it to your network and scaling sensitive data. That is something that cannot happen on the cloud, because you get visibility in real time, what is running on the platform. And then we have services like cloud trail which keep track of all the changes that are happening in the environment. So you can track what is changing in the environment in real time and keep a track of it. Again you have total control over where the data is stored. So any AWS service that you use, you specify a region, that region could be India, and then all the activities that you do all the data that you put into that service would reside in India. So that is the guarantee that we give you. Ashok mentioned the shared responsibility model, where we and the customer basically agree to work in a shared responsibility model, where security is a shared responsibility, what it means is Amazon is responsible for security of the infrastructure and then we provide all the features that are necessary to secure any solution that you build on top of it and partners like Mithi have all the expertise to use all these features to make the solution extremely extremely secure. So we work jointly and make sure that the solution that gets deployed in secure. Again, all of our data centres and a lot of our services are audited by third party auditors. Most of our services are certified on all these industry leading regulations be it ISO, be it PCIDSS, be it SOC, FIPS. So we are regularly audited and these audit reports are available to our partners and customers under NDA. So basically that talks about what controls do we have in place, how do we manage security and so on and so forth. So these third party audits are also a validation of the kind of security that the platform provides. So there is a quote at the bottom from the CTO of NASA. So NASA is one of our customers and they have workloads on AWS and he says based on our experience I feel that we can be more secure on AWS than in our own data centres. So that speaks a lot coming in from a customer like NASA. Moving on, like I mentioned, we have the worlds most demanding customers running workloads on our platform, We have government agencies, we have companies like FINRAA, Securities and Exchange Commission, so these guys run workloads on our platform and obviously they expect the platform to be extremely secure. Like I mentioned, we work based on customer feedback, our services are basically, the direction is decided based on customer feedback and these demanding customers have very stringent security requirements. So we put in a lot of security features every year and these features are available to every single customer that uses our platform. So whenever you do something in house in your organisation, your skills are limited to what people you have on your team. Whereas on the cloud, we build solutions which are based on feedback from these very demanding customers and basically that makes the platform extremely extremely secure. So that was on security, second is completeness of platform. So basically any platform that you choose, you need to be absolutely sure that as your business grows and as you want to add more features, you want to make sure that you do not want to tap into another party to complement the platform. From that perspective, as of today we have over 90 services in all these areas. Most of the people think that cloud is only about compute, storage and databases but it is much much much broader than that, so as of today Vaultastic consumes about 17 or more than 15 services to build the archival platform. The next would be high availability. Obviously everybody wants their solution to be highly available and we basically provide the ability to deploy highly available solutions on the cloud, and how do we do that. We do that through our architecture involving regions and availability zones. So as I mentioned we have 16 regions and 44 availability zones. So each region actually has two or more availability zones and each availability zone is a cluster of data centres and these availability zones are actually linked by low latency dark fibre which means that you could deploy your solutions across availability zones making them extremely fault tolerant, so you could deploy your primary database in one availability zone and a synchronous replica in another AZ. So even if one or more data centres go down, your data is safe and your application keeps running, so that basically helps our customers and partners deploy highly available solutions on Amazon. Durability, again like both Gopal and Ashok mentioned, AWS provides very high durability and that is key for solutions like email archival, because you want an email that is once archived to be there for life, to be there till desired. So we have services like S3 which is our object store which provides 11 9's of durability. So if you have 10,000 objects on S3, the chances of you losing one object is once every million years, that's the kind of durability that the platform provides from a storage perspective and it is extremely extremely difficult to basically create any infrastructure like this on prem. And finally, scalability, I think Ashok mentioned that they are ingesting data at the rate of 2 or 3 GB per second. That is awful lot of data right, imagine you procuring servers every month or every week to just keep augmenting the capacity that you have, but on AWS that is not the case, the platform is elastic, so in case of services like S3 you actually don't need to provision any storage, the storage is basically elastic by default, and you could just keep dumping data on S3. And then we have other services like EC2 which is our virtual machine service if I may say, where you could basically use features like auto-scaling which help you scale your application out and in and it could add servers or remove servers depending on the load on your application. So basically, what this says is if you have a platform that you want to deploy, we basically provide all the features and the tools that are necessary and we keep adding new services, so the platform is ever expanding. So that is the reason AWS is the best fit platform for a solution like Vaultastic and the reason for Mithi choosing us.