The AWS Nonprofit Credit Program

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing service that offers servers and data centers to organizations worldwide. AWS is a part of Amazon dedicated to delivering web services to developers and businesses who build online applications.

The term "cloud computing" refers to the on-demand delivery of IT resources via the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining data centers and servers, organizations can acquire technology like computing power, storage, databases, and other services on an as-needed basis. It’s similar to switching on a light in your home and receiving electricity from a power company.

With cloud computing, AWS manages and maintains technology infrastructure in a secure environment. Organizations use these resources remotely to develop and run their applications, access servers, or store and retrieve data. Capacity can grow or shrink instantly depending on an organization’s needs.

Agility

AWS lets organizations quickly spin up resources as they need them, deploying hundreds or even thousands of servers in minutes. This means you can very quickly develop and roll out new applications. It also means that your team can experiment and innovate more quickly and more frequently. If an experiment fails, you can always deprovision those servers without risk.

Cost savings

AWS allows nonprofits to trade capital expense for variable expense by paying for IT as they consume it. In most cases, these operating costs are less than those your organization would incur otherwise.

Elasticity

Organizations sometimes overprovision server capacity to ensure that they have enough power to handle their business operations at peak level of activity. AWS allows you to provision the amount of resources that you actually need. Nonprofits can instantly scale up or down along with the needs of their operations, often at lower costs.

Speed of innovation

You can focus high-value IT staff on developing applications instead of the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing infrastructure and data centers.

Global deployment  

AWS maintains data centers in different physical locations around the world. Each group of logical data centers is an Availability Zone. Using AWS, you can leverage 76 Availability Zones across 24 geographic regions worldwide.

Support

AWS support offers a range of plans that provide access to tools and expertise to aid the success and operational health of your AWS solutions. All support plans provide 24/7 access to customer service, AWS documentation, white papers, and support forums. For technical support and more resources to plan, deploy, and improve your AWS environment, you can select a support plan that best aligns with your needs.

AWS support offers four support plans: basic, developer, business, and enterprise. The basic plan is free of charge and offers support for account and billing questions and service limit increases. The other plans offer an unlimited number of technical support cases with pay-by-the-month pricing and no long-term contracts, providing different levels of support to meet your needs.

All AWS customers automatically have around-the-clock access to these features of the basic support plan:

● Customer service: one-on-one responses to account and billing questions
● Support forums
● Service health checks
● Documentation, white papers, and best practice guides

Innovation

Since 2012, AWS has introduced over 100 major new services. We continue to enhance the services based on customer response, usage, and needs. Moreover, AWS released more than 200 machine learning features and capabilities in 2018.

Longevity

Operating since 2006, AWS is the fastest-growing enterprise IT vendor in the world.

Yes. The AWS Cloud employs the same security measures as a traditional data center. These include physical data center security, separation of the network, and isolation of the server hardware and storage.

AWS has a shared responsibility model with the customer. AWS manages and controls the components from the host operating system and virtualization layer down to the physical security of the facilities in which the services operate. AWS customers are responsible for building secure applications.

AWS provides a wide variety of best practice documents, encryption tools, and other guidance that customers can leverage in delivering application-level security measures. In addition, AWS partners offer hundreds of tools and features to help nonprofits meet their security objectives, which range from network security to configuration management, access control, and data encryption.

One of the advantages of using the cloud is that organizations inherit best practices for policies, architecture, and operational processes built to satisfy the requirements of its most security-sensitive vendors. For example, Thorn is a nonprofit dedicated to defending children from sexual abuse. It leverages AWS to achieve mission-critical goals and trusts AWS with sensitive data.

Yes. AWS builds its data centers in multiple geographic regions, as well as across multiple Availability Zones within each region to offer maximum resiliency against system disruption. AWS designs its data centers with significant excess bandwidth connections so that if a major disruption occurs there is sufficient capacity to load-balance traffic to the remaining sites and minimize the impact on customers.

Additionally, AWS provides a Service Health Dashboard to shows the current operational status of each of our services in real time, so our uptime and performance are fully transparent.