By Dan Pudwell, Solutions Architect at Leighton
The most common mistakes businesses make with AWS – and how to avoid them.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become a go-to cloud provider for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Its wide range of services, scalability, and flexibility makes it an attractive option for organisations aiming to migrate to the cloud or optimise their existing cloud infrastructure.
However, having carried out dozens of Well-Architected Framework Reviews (WAFR) Dan Pudwell, Solutions Architect at Leighton, has seen companies make the same critical mistakes time and time again, leading to security vulnerabilities, inflated costs, and inefficiencies that hinder the overall success of cloud adoption.
So how can companies get the most out of AWS? By being aware of the most common pitfalls organisations can be confident they’re maximising on the plethora of opportunities offered by AWS and ensure their cloud infrastructure is working in the right way for their business.
Spotting the red flags: what should you be looking for?
Security
When it comes to AWS one of the most critical aspects you should be considering is your security and access management. Failure to ensure robust security is in place can lead to accidental misconfiguration, security breaches and the exposure of sensitive resources. Despite this many organisations neglect implementing strong security measures from day one leaving their cloud environments vulnerable.
This can be easily factored into AWS migration projects and by taking a few simple steps companies can help to ensure their cloud environments are protected. For example, the AWS root account should only be used for creation and critical administrative functions. By ensuring identity and access management (IAM) roles reflect the principle of least privilege – meaning only granting the permissions that are required to perform a specific task – companies can maintain control over their environments and minimise risk.
Organisations should also be looking to ensure that they enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all users, not just root account users and access keys should be rotated regularly to minimise the risk of compromised credentials. Ideally Single Sign On (SSO) with IAM Identity Centre should be used in place of users.
In addition, turning on services like CloudTrail and GuardDuty, whilst there is a small cost and some configuration, is essential for monitoring your accounts.
Cost optimisation
Another common mistake we often see is companies not considering the full costs associated with cloud platforms. A thorough implementation and management strategy should be developed at the outset to not only avoid incurring unexpected charges but also missing out on potential opportunities to make cost savings.
An essential part of this is a clear and robust tagging strategy, without consistent tagging of resources it becomes almost impossible to track usage and allocate costs accurately. There are several other ways that AWS users can achieve cost efficiencies including reserved instances and saving plans and these should be explored in mature projects. You can also set up cost alerts and budgets to monitor expenditure to avoid any surprises at the end of a billing cycle.
Reliability
One of the biggest, most costly mistakes companies can make is not considering scalability and future performance from the outset of their project. Architecting AWS environments without proper planning can often mean you run into issues later down the line. By following AWS best practice, automating infrastructure provisioning with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and pipelines, and ensuring consistent, repeatable environments companies can not only meet their needs now but also consider the future. If it’s a new project or future performance needs are difficult to assess consider using serverless architectures as they can work really well with scalability designed into the components.
It is also important to design, implement, and test disaster recovery and backup strategies tailored to organisational needs.
Operational excellence
Another key consideration should be compliance. Maintaining compliance in the cloud is challenging but critical, especially for industries like finance and healthcare. One of the best ways to manage governance across multiple accounts is to use AWS Organisations, this allows you to centralise control, governance and policy enforcement. Companies should also be looking to ensure proper audit trails that track changes – AWS CloudTrail is a good way to do this.
Other key mistakes that can trip organisations up include ensuring the use of effective monitoring and operations. These are key to maintaining a stable AWS environment. Without the right tools and processes in place, issues can go unnoticed until they escalate into larger problems. Likewise, not giving due time and attention to performance and resource optimisation, neglecting to use autoscaling to ensure applications can handle traffic spikes, not implementing proper caching and not optimising databases can all have a negative impact on performance.
So, what’s the solution?
AWS is a powerful platform, but to leverage its full potential, organisations need to ensure the proper planning, scoping and expertise is in place to ensure successful delivery, performance and scalability. By focusing on proper security management, cost control, architectural design, and operational best practices, businesses can maximise the benefits of their cloud environments. Following frameworks like the AWS Well-Architected Framework, implementing Infrastructure as Code, and adhering to best practices will help ensure that your AWS environment is efficient, secure, and cost-effective.
By being aware and avoiding these common mistakes, organisations can reduce the risks across their AWS projects and build a robust, scalable cloud infrastructure that supports their business goals.
leighton.com