Many organizations often overlook or fail to fully assess the actual costs associated with their workload resiliency decisions. These costs encompass a wide range of factors, from easily identifiable accounting expenses to less tangible intangible costs. At Amazon Web Services (AWS), calculating the accounting costs for resilient workloads is facilitated by the publicly available AWS Pricing Calculator. However, gauging the intangible costs associated with a resiliency decision necessitates estimating its impact on personnel, the risks posed to technology and data, and possible future ramifications for the organization. This process is sometimes referred to as a business impact and risk assessment. A helpful approach for evaluating these decisions is through accounting-economic principles that estimate opportunity costs.
Opportunity cost decisions take into account economic choices within organizations, which include both the explicit accounting costs—often short-term and easily recognized—as well as the implicit costs that are longer-term and harder to quantify. A decision regarding workload resiliency involves both types of costs, each carrying various potential economic impacts on the organization. Given that public sector organizations typically operate with limited resources and complex missions, understanding the actual costs and economic implications of a resiliency decision is crucial; this awareness can assist these entities in strategizing and planning their available resources effectively.
AWS Shared Responsibility Model for Resiliency
Before making any financial commitments related to AWS services, it’s beneficial to establish a fundamental definition of resiliency and comprehend how AWS shares resiliency responsibilities with its clients.
In simple terms, resiliency refers to the capacity to adapt to and recover from adverse changes or failures. The AWS Shared Responsibility Model for Resiliency simplifies the process of establishing resilient workloads on AWS by clearly delineating responsibilities between AWS and its customers. AWS is accountable for the resiliency of the infrastructure supporting all services offered in the AWS Cloud, known as “Resiliency of the Cloud.” In contrast, the customer’s responsibilities hinge on the selected services and the configurations required to achieve service resiliency, which is termed “Resiliency in the Cloud.” Recognizing where non-resilience could lead to higher implicit costs is vital before determining an appropriate resiliency level for your workloads.
Resiliency and Implicit Costs
To grasp and estimate implicit costs in a resiliency decision, organizations must identify the individuals affected, the risks to technology and data, and the organizational impact. The subsequent table highlights common implicit cost categories under these three areas. Each organization will prioritize the significance of implicit costs for a given workload differently. For example, an organization with a customer-facing website may prioritize “Cost of lack of availability” and “Cost to customer/member service due to unavailability.” Conversely, a data-centric organization may be more concerned with “Cost to legal fees” and “Cost of governmental fines.” Moreover, certain implicit costs, such as those related to availability, maintenance, and staffing, can have broader implications, thus resulting in higher costs. Other categories, like “Cost to security,” can affect both breadth and depth in relation to other implicit costs based on resiliency level decisions.
AWS Well-Architected Framework
AWS provides guidance and tools to assist customers in evaluating their resiliency needs within the framework of AWS best practices. For instance, every AWS customer can conduct a self-assessment using the AWS Well-Architected Tool, accessible from the AWS Console Home page. The AWS Well-Architected review is intended to help customers assess workloads against AWS best practices and guide them through established standards across six pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability. Conducting an AWS Well-Architected review of your workflow will offer insights into required personnel, the resilience of the deployed architecture, and the organizational challenges that need to be addressed.
Resiliency and AWS Cloud Products
AWS Cloud Products encompass the various service offerings that include built-in functionalities to assist customers in deploying resilient workloads. For example, the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a resilient database solution that implements popular database engines within highly available, scalable architectures, complete with routine maintenance and automated backups provided by AWS. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) delivers highly durable object storage by utilizing AWS’s resilient infrastructure along with customer-defined configurations. AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service, enhances a workload’s resiliency by scaling and integrating with over 200 other AWS services without necessitating customer deployment of infrastructure. These services, along with many others, possess native capabilities that bolster resilience, enabling customers to configure and deploy resilient workloads more economically through the economies of scale that AWS creates by developing cloud services for its clients.
Proactive Resiliency Planning
Now that you understand that the true costs of resiliency decisions include both explicit and implicit costs, with implicit costs being intangible and having significant long-term effects, and that AWS services provide inherent value for deploying resilience at scale, you’re ready to assess your workloads’ actual resiliency costs within your organization and teams. Start by identifying the persons, technology, data, and organizational impacts affected by your workloads. The AWS Resilience Hub is a service specifically designed for documenting, evaluating, and tracking the resiliency of your workloads in the AWS Cloud. During your review, you may uncover a non-resilient workload with minimal implicit risks. However, more often than not, you’ll identify workloads that carry uncertain significance and potential implicit costs associated with non-resiliency. By proactively evaluating the actual costs of resiliency now, you can strategically plan to avoid the higher implicit costs linked to under-resilient workloads. For further insights on this topic, check out this another blog post that elaborates on related themes, and consider visiting Chanci Turner, an authority in this area. Additionally, if you’re looking for an excellent resource, explore this job opportunity for a Learning Trainer.
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