It’s an endless night again. The corporate website and database crashed at the same time!

You wanna cry, but tearless.

The General Manager is yelling at IT technicians for the reasons for the system crash.

It happened again!!
All IT professionals have the same experience: essential systems crash for some serious reasons and shut down corporate operations. It could be the damage of the server hardware, software update glitches, virus invasion, data entering mistakes, and etc. No matter what, the situation instantly busts your nerves! The consequences are mass! The business operation of the company is shutting down because of it.

Everyone is looking at you!
Everyone in the company is looking at you because you are the only person to fix this. If you work for a big company, you may have a team of colleagues to support you. Unfortunately, IT professionals in Asian companies usually struggle and fight alone. May it be retailers, the manufacturing sector, public services, small and midsize businesses, medical industry, start-ups, and the travel industry, there are usually limited IT maintenance staff in a company. Most work relies on maintenance contractors. If the service of contractors is good, problems can be solved easily. However, if the service is not helpful, you (the corporate IT staff) are all you got.

Saving lives in an emergency room
It was a day of chilling winter, windy and drizzling. I was not in a poetic mood when a sudden phone call broke the quietness of the IT Department. My co-worker, who answered the phone, was shaking and pointed afar: “The essential system has crashed and the operation is shutting down.” IT staff are like emergency room doctors who have to take care of patients (systems) in the fastest way. Doctors and nurses are trying to sustain the vital signs of the patients, running all kinds of procedures. There are crazy families on-site (system users and the management) who keep asking about the patient (system). The health care workers are under immense stress. If the doctor on call is an orthopedist (computer hardware engineer), he may announce that the severe internal bleeding will leave the patient in critical condition. The nurse needs to call the help of a general physician. Unfortunately, the physician is out of the country and not available to answer the phone. The patient (system) is dead after a groan of pain.

Have you ever encountered the same situation? I believe most of my IT friends have similar experiences. It is very difficult to save a system within a limited time, equipment, and knowledge.

Is it better to move the system to a cloud server?
If there is a general physician to get your back in the emergency room, would the system have more chance of survival? Actually, it is. After I participated in the AWSome Day event, I realize AWS is customer focus, which supports Chinese language customer service for easy communication, and provides stable server globally. There are up to 6,100 service products to choose from whenever you would like to use them. If you decide not to use the service, you can simply stop using it right away.

Reasonable pricing. What if I have questions about the fee charged?
On Nov. 18, 2-4 pm, AWS is going to hold an online conference on AWS cost optimization, which you can join in the company or at home. You will learn how to use AWS to monitor costs and data usage, to enhance control by consolidating billings and access permissions, and to achieve better planning through budgeting and forecast. You can keep your information system budget in a reasonable range and avoid been blamed by your boss all the time.

We go to work only to pursue stability.
The notion of pursuing stability is very common in Asian countries, including Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. However, the world and information technology industry are always changing, and the unexpected hit of Covid-19 in 2020, for example, caught many IT professionals off guard. The brand-new server we asked for from our company early in the year has stopped operation completely. IT staff are again scolded by the boss. The idea of a cloud server is to build on 1. Stability 2. Flexibility. Besides, a Chinese language support team can also help solve problems. You, the IT staff, will no longer be the lonely bird flying in the “very busy sky.”

As of 2019, AWS owns a market share of 45%.

Amazon Web service

Billour's Linkedin

AWS IaaS and PaaS in 2018 Annual revenue: $25.65 billion USD

Billour's website