The next instalment: Hal, Dave, and AWS

“Hi, this is Hal”, said Hal loudly into his phone.

“Hal, it’s Dave. Just calling you back about Switchplane and Amazon. You were a bit concerned about using Switchplane because they use Amazon to manage their Cloud-based servers and why should we use a mass-market retailer to do that? But it’s not Amazon Retail, it’s AWS.”

“AWS? What’s that?”

“Amazon Web Services. They’re the world’s top-listed Cloud provider. AWS is consistently rated by the industry as the best in the world, with revenue of $33 billion last year. They’re bigger in this market than Microsoft and even Google.”

“Oh. OK. Never heard of ‘em, but if you say so Dave, fine. So they’re secure then?”

“No doubt about that, Hal. if we go with Switchplane, we get pretty much unbreakable 24/7 uptime.”

“Sounds great! Any other benefits?”

“Well, our data will be protected rock-solid. Unlimited storage. Everythings encrypted, so our customers’ data, like their personal details, all that kind of thing, will be completely secure. Loads of redundancy.”

“Redundancy? Dave, that’s not a word I like.”

“This is good redundancy. What it means is that a complete copy of your systems and data is maintained simultaneously on a number of independent parallel systems, so if something happens to the original one, there’s a backup that kicks in so quickly you won’t even notice.”

“That sounds brilliant. So there’s nothing else we need to worry about?”

“Nope - don’t worry Hal, everything’s going to be alright”, said Dave softly.

“Dave, that’s my line, stop taking the - oh, he’s hung up.”