Enterprise Cloud Services

ECS, enterprise cloud services, AWS, cloud

Enterprise Cloud Services is Emory University's preferred and recommended Cloud service for enterprise applications.  The service provides application owners a cloud platform within Amazon Web Services to build and run their applications with central IT support.  Unlike the AWS at Emory service, which is designed to provide users with an autonomous experience, Enterprise Cloud Services provides a more managed service with pre-built solutions to help with deploying and operating enterprise-style applications - including data protection, deployment pipelines, disaster recovery, high availability, logging, monitoring, networking, patching, remote access, and security services.

Key Features and Benefits

Some of the key benefits of Enterprise Cloud Services include:

  • More Closely Align Costs with Usage.  Institutions like Emory University often have variable workloads such as seasonal web traffic or recruitment campaigns.  Additionally, the infrastructure used by development and testing teams is used far less than 100% of the time.  Using Enterprise Cloud Services will allow Emory University to more closely align costs with actual usage for these workloads.

  • Better Manage Growth of Physical Environments.  Even in periods of slow growth, there are capability thresholds that can be breached by small increases in demand.  With Enterprise Cloud Services, resources are purchased as you need them with virtually no lead time, so there is no need to maintain the existing levels of excess capacity. 
  • Improve Quality Through Automation.   One of the primary differentiators of cloud infrastructure, such as what Emory has deployed with Enterprise Cloud Services, is the increased automation that cloud involves.  Automation (such as automated deployment pipelines) is used to provision infrastructure elements, platforms, and, in advanced environments, full multi-tier applications.  Through this automation, enterprises using state-of-the-art cloud practices avoid many of the problems that plague others who manually configure their environments.
  • Increased Business Continutiy and Disaster Recovery.   The AWS global computing architecture, which is the basis for our Enterprise Cloud Services platform, provides multiple regions and multiple availability-zone (AZ) options for increased Disaster Recovery capabilities.