Amazon Trusted Advisor Saves Cloud Users $Millions

Going beyond the basics, Amazon has a service called Trusted Advisor that is available on a number of its paid support tiers.

The basic idea behind Trusted Advisor is to offer users advice and options on how best to configure and utilize their cloud deployment.

The Trusted Advisor effort was born out of an event that scarred Brent Jaye, is VP of AWS Supportearly on in his AWS support career.

“I was here in April of 2011 when had that big outage and the most frustrating thing from the support side, while we were in the midst of the outage, there was nothing support could do for customers,” Jaye said. “But if we would have backed up the customers prior to the problem and provided some guidance beforehand on best practices, there was actually quite a bit that could have been done.”

So instead of following a ‘break-fix’ model, Trusted Advisor helps to advocate for a more pro-active approach to prevent problems before they occur and to mitigate risk. The Trusted Advisor system is also a valuable tool in that it can recommend to users how they can save money as well.

Amazon is confident in the value of Trusted Advisor because it has measured its effectiveness. Jaye said that over the course of the last 90 days, Trusted Adviosr had provided over 399,000 recommendations that have resulted in over $69 million in annualized savings for customers.

Read the full story at Datamation:
Inside Amazon’s Cloud Support

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.