I’m a few months in to the formal running of Beaty Consultancy now, and after looking back through my blog postings, I realised that I haven’t actually written about why I started the business. What’s this “Friendly, affordable AWS consultancy services” business all about? Let’s fix that now.

Possibilities

I’m started my career in the IT industry in the early 2000’s, when virtualisation wasn’t a mainstream thing, never mind cloud computing. Okay, I know mainframes kinda did the whole multi-tenancy thing a couple of decades earlier, but this is my blog, and I’m using artistic license.

I won’t dance around the same garden as a million other blogs out there, and talk about the need to know what capacity you might need for the next 5 years when you buy your physical server, though this is true. No, I’m amazed by the abstraction of services which is now commonplace. Want a database but don’t have a DBA? No worries, AWS will do most of your business-as-usual DBA work for you. Want to run a tiny web app for captioning photographs people upload but don’t have the budget for a sysadmin to look after servers? No problem, AWS will string the resources together for you, and you just worry about your code.

That’s awesome, no? But let’s open up the picture to include the impact this has on business. That first example of a company using database-as-a-service, would they have deployed the application which relied on that database if they did need a DBA? The tiny startup who make a few dollars a day in ad revenue from their image tagging app, would it have been worth their while to deploy a server for that?

Maybe they would. After all, IT and business in general has been around a lot longer than AWS and its rivals. However, there’s no question that it is changing perceptions of what is possible, cost-effective and achievable.

Challenges

Of course there are challenges in harnessing the fantastic opportunities that platform-as-a-service cloud computing offers. If there weren’t, I’d have to find something else to do, other than AWS consultancy. I think I’d make a half decent barman. Anyway, my point being that most people need a helping hand to get moving in the right direction when embracing the cloud. That’s where I saw a gap in the market, and started Beaty Consultancy.

You might be questioning that last sentence; a gap in the market. After all, there are any number of IT consultants and cloud gurus to choose from, so it’s not really a gap, is it. Well actually, I think it is.

Friendly

Beaty Consultancy primarily works with businesses of fewer than 50 people. These are very often startups, but just as often are small businesses with simple needs which need to be understood before they can be met. That’s where the “friendly”, in our tag line of “friendly, affordable cloud consultancy services” comes in.

All too often technologists get too caught up in the technical aspects of a solution they would like to deploy on behalf of a customer. That’s great, and we have passion for technology too, but we understand that our clients often don’t. They want their IT contractor to be trustworthy, and to carry out their IT strategy in line with their company’s goals and ambitions.