AWS Getting Started Guide For Small Business Owners

Objective

Small and medium businesses employ more than half the global workforce, accounting for 90 percent of all businesses worldwide.? As such, they form the growth engine of the world’s economy.?

Yet, most small businesses fail because they struggle to scale cost-effectively and run out of cash.?

AWS is a great equalizer and allows small business owners to leverage the same cutting-end technology available to large enterprises without the huge cost. AWS helps small businesses innovate faster and compete with larger businesses.?

In this guide, you will learn the critical first steps to get started with AWS so you can decide for yourself if AWS is the right choice for your business.?

The goal is to provide you with all the information you need to make a decision about AWS without having to hire expensive consultants or talk to AWS sales teams.

AWS First Steps

Here is the sequence of steps you need to take if you want to get started with AWS for your small business

Define Your Business Objectives

As a business owner, you will have business objectives and it is important to define them so you can share them with an AWS Consultant if required.?

Well-defined business objectives can help you identify the technology requirements quickly and eliminate any unnecessary technology investments.

For example: One of your business objectives can be to improve customer experience and you measure it with a Net Promoter Score(NPS).

If you don’t have centralized support, a contact center solution like Amazon Connect can help achieve your objective.?

Once you have a list of well-defined business objectives, you can move on to the next step.

Document the current challenges

Every business has challenges and it's important to be aware of them and also have a plan to solve them. The goal of this step is to?

1. Document the challenges
2. Prioritize the challenges based on their impact on the business objectives

Review The Challenges With an AWS Expert

We understand that not all business challenges can be solved by technology and it is important to review them with an AWS expert to differentiate process challenges and technology challenges.

After the initial consultation, you’ll have a list of challenges that can be resolved with AWS and help you achieve the business objectives.

Complete the cloud readiness assessment

As we believe AWS can help you resolve the challenges and achieve your business outcomes, it's important that you and your team are ready to adopt AWS cloud and maximize your return on investment.?

AWS offers a self-service Cloud Readiness Assessment Tool (CART). This tool will give you a detailed readiness assessment report of your organization’s ability to move to the cloud.?

Here’s the link to the AWS CART.

https://cloudreadiness.amazonaws.com/#/cart

Engage an AWS Small Business Partner

After you complete the assessment there are a number of ways you can continue with your AWS journey. If you're an in-house technical team, you can create an AWS account at?

https://portal.aws.amazon.com/billing/signup#/start/email

After creating the account, you can start using the various services and most of the services offer a free tier.?

However, we recommend that you engage an AWS partner who specializes in Small Business to guide you through the onboarding process.?

AWS Startup Kit For Small Business

We at Cloud Optimize Solutions understand small businesses and accounting firms better than our competition.?

With our years of experience serving small businesses, we’ve identified a set of core services that will help you get started with AWS from Day 1 and enjoy the benefits without spending a lot of time and resources on research.?

The startup kit is designed to cover all critical business areas like

1. Security
2. Storage
3. Customer Experience
4. Remote Workforce Management
5. Backup & Recovery
6. Governance & Risk Management

Here’s what you get as part of the AWS Startup Kit For Small Business

AWS Account Setup

1. Register for an AWS account.
2. Register for the AWS Rewards program
3. Setup admin account

AWS Credits Program

Register your business for the AWS Small Business Credits Program

AWS Control Tower Setup

1. Create Organizational Units
2. Landing zone setup
3. Account Factory setup
4. Integrate with Identity Manager
5. Integrate with AWS IAM

AWS Storage Setup

1. Define the storage strategy
2. Create the S3 buckets
3. Setup AWS encryption for the buckets

Amazon Connect Setup

1. Amazon Connect complete setup and configuration
2. Amazon Connect Customer Profiles setup
3. Amazon Connect Cases Setup
4. Amazon Connect Outbound Campaigns setup
5. Setup Agent Application
6. Configure queues, and routing profiles as required

Support Sessions - 3 Hours

1. Training -3 Hours
2. Unlimited Email Support

The startup kit is an end-to-end solution that will help any small business achieve its business objectives. If you want to get started with AWS, send an email to [email protected] and I’ll be happy to assist you further.?