As you migrate applications from on-premise data centers, or when building new native cloud applications, you must ensure your infrastructure is secure, resilient, efficient and high-performing. 

Designing a cloud architecture can seem overwhelming, especially for those implementing architectures to support business critical solutions for the first time. Your cloud foundational architecture will form the backbone to delivering effective workloads that suit your business needs. As these needs evolve so will your architecture so monitoring and reviewing your setup should be an ongoing, iterative process.

What are the benefits?

1. Business Efficiency | Staff productivity - operating in a cloud environment delivers business efficiency and staff productivity 
2. Redeploy resources for strategic work - organizations can move away from the day-to-day operational headaches associated with managing IT infrastructure. IT expertise can be put to better use doing strategic, differentiating work, such as developing new and improved applications and delivering a better user experience
3. Automate error prone processes - automate error-prone human work with tools such as AWS CloudFormation and AWS Service Catalog, which enable highly repeatable deployment of proven configurations. It provides system-wide visibility into utilization, performance, and operational metrics to identify and address issues quickly, helping reduce the complexity of operations 
4. Security by design - Prevent, detect, respond and remediate by running secure workloads on infrastructure designed to meet best practices for security compliance frameworks such as NIST, ISO, or HIPPA. Implement AWS WAF policies to block, filter and monitor malicious traffic to your application stack to mitigate DDOS, XSS, SQL injection and other common attack vectors.