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A Look At Amazon Web Services Through 4 Case Studies

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a powerful set of services that provide the infrastructure necessary to run a business in the cloud.

We know it’s sometimes difficult to figure out if a service is right or not, but these case studies show exactly how AWS helps businesses thrive and grow via the cloud.

1. GRAIL

GRAIL is a life sciences company seeking to study cancer and find better ways to detect it early. The company wanted to run one of the largest genomic sequencing studies ever.

There are only two problems. First, storing and processing hundreds of thousands of datasets. Second, maintaining compliance and security while storing sensitive medical data in the cloud. Amazon Web Services are designed for compliance and security. Plus, the services scale easily to meet the needs of the large amounts of data coming in from the research study.

2. Expedia

Expedia is a company that works hard to improve the customer experience as it relates to planning travel arrangements. The company discovered consumers were abandoning the site due to mistyping their searches. To improve the click-through rate, Expedia partnered with Amazon Web Services to create a typing prediction feature to minimize the chance of errors.

The company also needed servers in multiple locations to reduce latency issues. Due to Amazon having strategically placed data centers, Expedia was able to reduce latency without purchasing additional on-site hardware.

3. PBS

PBS maintains 360 member stations throughout the United States. To deliver content to more viewers, PBS offers streaming content. However, the solution the company was using led to videos failing and no way to determine where the issues were coming from.

Since moving to Amazon Web Services, specifically CloudFront, PBS has experienced 50% fewer video errors. AWS also introduced an invalidation feature to help track the source of video errors.

4. Slack

Slack is well-known as a team collaboration tool, but it takes extensive resources to provide this service to millions of users. The founders had already learned from previous failed ventures that to succeed, a business like Slack needed a scalable infrastructure, a lean staff and of course, low implementation costs.

The solution was to turn to Amazon Web Services. What would normally take weeks to scale when an upgrade was needed took less than an hour. Costs were lower and less staff was needed to maintain the minimal on-site hardware.

Eager to learn more about how Amazon Web Services benefits businesses of all sizes? See how we can help your business get started with AWS today.