Organisations around the world are accelerating their journey to the cloud as the migration becomes easier and more cost effective. The Cisco Global Cloud Index has shown that cloud data centre traffic will represent 95 percent of total data centre traffic by 2021, a figure hardly imaginable a few years ago. However, not all data can be moved to the cloud. Regulatory, latency and security requirements often prevents customers from harnessing the value of cloud. Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Outposts extends the benefit of AWS region to the client. With the launch of Outposts in Singapore, our clients can now benefit from the full suite of Cloud services in an ultra-low latency hybrid environment managed by NCS and AWS.

NCS is an advanced consulting partner of AWS and offers one-stop managed services that capitalise on the agility of Outposts, augmented by our unified service desk and managed services for applications, middleware and data. By extending the cloud to our customer, NCS enables our clients to enjoy the benefit of a fully managed cloud service. With over 20 years of experience in managing hardware and support on behalf of our clients, this evolution to support hyperscale solutions is also natural extension of NCS' business. Having optimised the hardware support operations, NCS is able to maintain and extend the operational excellence we already provide our clients with the introduction of Outposts.

With AWS Outposts you can run Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, container-based services such as Amazon EKS, database services such as Amazon RDS on AWS Outposts and analytics services such as Amazon EMR on premises. You can seamlessly extend your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud on premises and run some AWS services locally on Outposts and connect to a broad range of services available in the local AWS Region. You can use the same AWS APIs, tools, and security controls to run, manage, and secure your applications on premises just as in the cloud.

Sometimes, data needs to remain in a particular country, state, or municipality for regulatory, contractual, or information security reasons – as is often the case with financial services, healthcare, oil & gas, and other highly-regulated industries. With Outposts, you can control where your workloads run and where your data resides, while using local operational tooling, for things like monitoring and stability. It also allows low-friction movement of workloads between public cloud and the edge, and vice versa, so you can easily adapt to any regulatory changes. AWS Outposts allows you to securely store and process data that needs to remain on premises or in countries where there is no AWS region. This help address requirements of companies in highly regulated industries and or those located in countries with data residency requirements.

AWS Outposts delivers a truly consistent hybrid experience by offering the same hardware infrastructure, services, APIs, management, and operations on premises as in the cloud. Unlike other hybrid solutions that require use of different APIs, manual software updates, and purchase of third-party hardware and support, Outposts provide a truly consistent developer and IT operations experience across on premises and cloud environments.

NCS works with Singtel and Optus Business, which have large networks of clients on their journey to the cloud. For example, for Singtel’s Meg@pop, NCS was able to extend Outposts with better “adjacency” to the cloud. We are also helping over 2,000 people across Singapore and Australia be AWS-trained so they can deliver its services as part of NCS’ offerings. The NCS-AWS relationship is growing, and we will continue to expand into new cloud competencies especially in IoT, Robotics, Analytics, Big Data and AI, to help our clients maximise their investments.

NCS seeks to help our clients on their journey to the cloud by leveraging new solutions that can optimise their data centre footprint. AWS is a great solution – but as we know, not all clients can move all workloads to the public cloud. This is where NCS steps in to help our clients choose the right cloud to move to, and the best migration strategy to adopt. If one app cannot be moved to the cloud due to security or regulatory reasons, NCS can also provide an Outposts solution, alongside multipronged strategies such as SaaS, PaaS, public clouds, hybrid clouds, private clouds, hyperconverged infrastructure and/or colocation.

NCS does this by mapping the workloads to the desired application migration strategy (6Rs) and its target cloud, and helps steer our clients towards the best outcome. No matter which phase the client is in, NCS has the right suite of services to help our clients in planning and transforming their workloads and operations.

NCS also helps our clients navigate the changes that Outposts brings to their operating models, and enables the management of multi-modal services. While AWS simplifies the control pane and environment, this still needs to dovetail with our client’s current data centre operations for other hardware in their data centres. In a similar vein, NCS operates managed services – helping our clients operate the new multi-modal cloud environment.

In the industry for over 20 years managing everything from traditional infrastructure, database design and management, to DevOps and cloud migration, NCS has the know-how to manage multi-speed and multi-modal applications, infrastructure and data centres. NCS has also gone through the full cycle of migrating our clients from on-premises data centres to private clouds to public clouds and now to hyperscale clouds. Drawing on NCS’ vast multi-cloud competency, our on-premise experience, and our GTM with Digital Transformation, we have the capabilities to take Outposts beyond just an extended AWS platform - we provide an overall package to help our clients on their transformation journey.

Outposts is an extension of the AWS Cloud where clients get the same experience as the AWS region delivered in their own backyard. While Outposts inherits the same rigour that AWS applies to its public cloud, it also opens many other doors, all in a secure manner. And, with the NCS suite of services, our clients can build business solutions in a rapid and compliant manner. This saves time and simplifies hardware procurement and administration, in a single contract with NCS which covers cloud subscription and hardware across both the public cloud and Outposts, augmented with a holistic view of all the consumption in one place.