Amazon Private Cloud: Secure, Flexible and Cost-Effective
For a long time now, companies have been deploying project management software on local servers. Since all data is stored behind a corporate firewall, local software use ensures high-level data security. However, it has its considerable disadvantages too. In-house software deployment 
allows to access data from work place only therefore limits employee flexibility. Also, every network requires maintenance and expenses associated with it. For a small or startup company such expenses may be unaffordable.
With the development of cloud computing technologies things have become easier. Cloud-based PM applications do not require any hardware infrastructure or preliminary setup. For a reasonable price companies can sign up for a SaaS solution and get project management software up and running instantly. They can access projects from anywhere and work in teams online.
But for all that, there’s still a good deal of skepticism with respect to SaaS. Data storage in a multi-tenant architecture where your data exists along with data of numerous other companies may be unsafe. Even though vendors guarantee high-level security and credibility, this may not be convincing for a company. Especially, if you run business where data loss or disclosure might cause irreversible consequences.
A great alternative to both on-premise and SaaS deployment is public AMI (Amazon Machine Image). Within Amazon EC2 service companies can launch their own virtual PC (instance) in Amazon private cloud and deploy software on it. However, only a few developers of project management tools offer public AMIs for their products. TeamLab and Mindtouch are a couple PM solutions that come to mind. To overview the deployment procedure and its benefits, let’s take TeamLab as an example.
In order to start using TeamLab, a company needs to sign up for Amazon account, launch an instance and roll out TeamLab AMI on it. The platform is fully pre-configured, so the setup is easy and takes about 15 minutes (watch the video to learn more).
This type of software deployment has considerable advantages. In particular, Amazon offers a choice of instance types depending on the company size and computing resources needed. It also allows to activate/deactivate instances and scale their capacity instantly as company requirements change. Neither local servers, nor SaaS solutions provide such a great level of flexibility.
As companies only pay for capacity they actually use, AMI is really cost-effective in comparison to local network setup. Along with that, companies get high-level security. Amazon gives extra guarantees for data safety, there is 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of stored data.
As a result, project management in Amazon private cloud turns out to be secure, flexible and cost-effective. And these are the main factors companies usually pay attention to when making a decision on a certain PM tool.
