INAP Introduces New Managed AWS Support Plans
INAP announced today its new Managed AWS support plans, offering greater service capabilities and more flexibility for a broad range of public cloud use cases and budgets. Each plan offers critical features and benefits like consolidated billing, access to certified AWS architects and technicians, and around-the-clock troubleshooting.
Premium features include advanced deployment services, interconnectivity to AWS from INAP data centers, flexible solution architecture, and comprehensive reporting and cost optimization consultation.
You can learn all the key details of the support plans—Service First On-Demand and Service First Premier—by reading on below or heading to our Managed AWS service page.
First, though, some context for why we believe Managed AWS with INAP is a whole lot more than a one-off solution.
Multicloud & Hybrid IT Have Arrived
Managed AWS complements INAP’s existing cloud, colocation and network portfolio, allowing customers to fully realize the potential of hybrid strategies shaping the future of IT.
As reported in INAP’s 2019 State of IT Infrastructure Management, on-premise-only IT strategies are facing steep decline. A majority (56 percent) of organizations currently maintaining their own data centers will be moving at least some of their infrastructure off-premise within the next three years; 78 percent of those organizations will be selecting hyperscale providers like AWS for specific workloads.
The challenge for many organizations, however, is that AWS is whole new ball game from an operational and economics perspective.
While the platform offers compelling solutions for a variety of applications, it is as complex as it is powerful. Even for skilled IT infrastructure professionals, achieving proficiency in the platform and its ever-growing list of tools and products is no easy feat. According to Amazon’s own recommendations, attempting the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification requires a year of platform experience and studying. Practitioners chasing mastery can add another year for the Professional certificate and several months of prep for specialty certifications like networking and security.
Do you need these credentials to spin up a cloud environment on AWS? No, but we believe there are two related reasons Amazon emphasizes their certification programs and maintains a vast database of technical documentation.
First, AWS’s support model is designed for DIY shops. Outside of resolving underlying AWS infrastructure and network issues, Amazon leaves you on your own for environment configuration and optimization.
Second, running mission-critical workloads in AWS without a deep understanding of the platform’s nuances and complexity can lead to significant problems: sticker shock and blown budgets, workload performance degradation, or worse yet, security vulnerabilities and downtime caused by environment misconfigurations and architectural mistakes.
For many IT organizations operating hybrid and multicloud strategies, learning a brand-new platform is not the best use of time and limited resources.
In fact, nearly 8 in 10 IT pros we surveyed believe they could bring more value to their organization if they spent less time on routine tasks like cloud server monitoring and maintenance. Increasingly, IT professionals’ skills are better spent on value-added tasks like new application development and collaborating with business units on new technology initiatives.
This is all to say that Amazon has made a conscious choice to rely on third-party partners like INAP to help customers succeed.
Our Managed AWS plans are carefully designed to help IT organizations achieve the promise of hyperscale cloud without confronting operational headaches along the way.
Simply put: Our experienced team of AWS certified solutions architects and support experts mastered AWS so you don’t have to.
INAP Managed AWS: Service Plan Overview
Managed Support Services
Service First On-Demand
For a low monthly fee, customers receive core infrastructure monitoring and response, ticketing and hotline access, consolidated billing and basic issue mitigation—e.g., break/fix and simple configurations.
Service First Premier
A fully managed, proactive support experience with advanced monitoring, performance optimization best practices, and detailed monthly reporting. You’ll receive hands-on management for all supported AWS services active in your deployment. For infrastructure issues with AWS data centers, our team will work directly with Amazon representatives.
AWS Migration Support and Deployment Services
For customers new to AWS or for customers deploying new environments, INAP offers two tiers of onboarding and deployment services.
Tier 1: A certified onboarding engineer will implement architecture best-practices tailored to your applications, spin-up your instances and configure services.
Tier 2: This white-glove onboarding service includes everything from Tier 1, plus:
- Custom image configuration
- Network and load balancer configuration
- Access management and security configuration
- Set up of up to five enhanced AWS services
Add-on services include advanced solution architecture for complex deployments, migration support and AWS Direct Connect configuration.
Deployment services are only available to customers signing up for one of INAP’s Service First support plans.
Common AWS Use Cases
INAP’s AWS experts support a vast array of Amazon’s powerful toolkit, specializing in four primary areas: hyperscale compute and storage environments, off-premise backup, serverless, and multicloud.
Hyperscale: INAP manages and optimizes your core AWS infrastructure, including EC2, VPC, ELB, S3 and RDS.
Off-Premise Backup: Using AWS’s wide range of cloud backup storage services to support both application and archival compliance requirements, INAP manages the backup schedule and data life cycle.
Serverless: Using AWS Lamda, INAP will design and operate the ideal environment for your serverless backend and data processing systems.
Multicloud & Hybrid: Pair the ideal AWS solution with your on-premise, INAP Colo or INAP Cloud environment to improve performance and reliability.
In the coming weeks, we’ll break down common reference architectures for each of these specialty areas and share advice for getting started.
In the meantime, chat with us today and download the following resources:
INAP Managed AWS Overview [pdf]
INAP Managed AWS FAQ [pdf]
