Pricing

Cloud pricing provides publicly available pricing to all customers. Unlike legacy IT, customers:

  • Use a pay-as-you-go model with on-demand, utility-like pricing.
  • Have no upfront costs.
  • Are not required to make a long-term financial commitment.

Security

AWS is responsible for the separation of physical and logical access of the cloud. Customers retain ownership and control of their content to meet the shared security objectives.

Customer Responsibility

Customers are responsible for security in the cloud. When using AWS services, we maintain complete control over our content and are responsible for managing critical content security requirements, including:

  • What content we choose to put on AWS.
  • Which services we use.
  • In which AWS Region content stays.
  • The fromat and structure of that content and whether it is masked, anonymised, or encrypted.
  • Who has access to that content and how those access rights are granted, managed, and revoked.

AWS Responsibility

AWS is responsible for security of the cloud. AWS is responsible for protecting the global infrastructure including Regions, Availability Zones, and edge locations.

Data Sovereignty and Data Residency

Two major topic for many customers are:

  • Data sovereignty: ownership over data.
  • Data residency: requirement that all content processed and stored in an IT system remain within a specific country’s borders.

In the shared responsibility model, customers:

  • Continue to own their data.
  • Choose the geographic location(s) to store their data.
  • Can download or delete their data whenever they like.
  • Can “crypto-delete” their data by deleting the master encryption keys that are required to decrypt their data keys.
  • Should consider the sensitivity of their data and decide if and how to encrypt the data while it is in transit and at rest.

Sustainability

AWS is more sustainable than on-premises infrastructure, because AWS:

  • Focuses on energy efficiency.
  • Continuously innovates in data centers to reduce energy usage.
  • Uses scale to achieve much higher resource usage and energy efficiency than the typical on-premises data center.
  • Has global infrastructure that is built on Amazon custom hardware - purpose built and optimised for workloads run by AWS customers.

Governance and Operationalisation

Cloud governance references to the set of policies, processes, and practices implemented to effectively manage and control the use of cloud resources within an organisation. It involves establishing guidelines and mechanisms to ensure compliance, security, cost optimisation, and operation efficiency in the cloud environment.

Terms and Conditions

CSPs operate on a one-to-many scale to offer standardised services. It is critical that we:

  • Engage CSPs early to get the best fit and resolve differences.
  • Incorporate and use the CSP’s terms to the fullest extent possible to avoid misalignment.
  • Avoid traditional IT contract terms as the basis for a cloud contract.
  • Recognise the differences among CSPs, cloud-managed service providers, and resellers.

Agreement Forms

AWS has 2 different agreement forms for customers who directly contract with AWS:

  • Online Customer Agreement: accepeted during the AWS account registration process. AWS can update these T&Cs at any time. The majority of AWS customers are on this agreement.
  • AWS Enterprise Agreement: gives certain customers the option to tailor agreements that best suit their needs.