In delivering a cloud service, knowledge of the system’s infrastructure isn’t always apparent from the front end. But any engineer can tell you that lack of visibility doesn’t make it any less important.
As our partners and end-users know, fundamental to Wildix is our use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to power our cloud solutions. AWS shows up frequently in our branding for hosted services, and for good reason: we work closely with the company to ensure an ideal delivery of service.
In fact, this hard work has earned Amazon’s attention. As of December 2022, we’re celebrating over six months of AWS certification — meaning that Amazon has officially recognized Wildix cloud services as being both fully secure and run by a highly knowledgeable team.
But how did Wildix reach this level of expertise? More importantly, what does it mean for our cloud services?
To answer both, let’s take some time to review how Wildix has been working with AWS to deliver our line of UC&C solutions in the cloud.
Why AWS?
First, it’s important to consider why Wildix chose to partner with AWS instead of, for example, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure.
The biggest reason comes down to AWS’s wide range of server locations. As Amazon themselves will proudly tell you, AWS comprises data centers around the world, from Ireland to Sweden to wide coverage across North America.
On top of giving us plenty of failovers in case of one center’s outage, this also ensures that any given Wildix instance will be geographically near an AWS server, reducing latency and improving the reliability of services.
Reliability is also a major factor. AWS servers have a record uptime, meaning that Wildix services running on them will have similarly reliable accessibility. A major reason why we earned AWS certification is the fact that we achieved 99.999% uptime in 2022, which was made easier by the actual AWS infrastructure.
Finally, AWS’s global distribution makes it simpler for us to maintain security and legal compliance. Because this partnership allows us to use data centers in many countries, we can more reliably store user data within users’ own localities, which is a key requirement set by the GDPR and many local European laws. Using multiple centers managed by Amazon also drastically reduces the chance of data break-ins thanks to the company’s strict physical and virtual security requirements.
Simply put, AWS is the best platform available to design and deliver the global UC&C solution Wildix strives to provide.
How We Use AWS
Obviously, the main way Wildix uses AWS is to deliver our cloud services. Any Wildix solution used via a cloud deployment arrives to your devices thanks to the AWS infrastructure. And, as we said, it arrives with minimal latency thanks to AWS centers being geographically near most users.
Of course, availability is just one advantage. The AWS infrastructure also enables a great many added features to improve the Wildix solutions on offer.
From a usability standpoint, one of the most notable of these is AI. As existing users know, a major point of development for Wildix solutions is integrating AI for faster analysis of text, especially speech transcriptions. Thanks to our AWS partnership, we have access to greater AI capabilities, enabling us to further this technology and create more intelligent tools for automatic text analysis and improved sales methodologies.
Then on the development side, an enormous benefit from AWS is their serverless Lambda approach to building infrastructure. In short, Lambda allows us to quickly upload and implement code on the backend while scaling it dynamically as needed, instead of ramping up the additions over time. Obviously, this saves us a great amount of time and effort in releasing new features and elements of the infrastructure.
All told, using AWS for our cloud deployment has been enormously successful purely from an implementation standpoint. And fortunately, certification on the platform brings even further benefits as well.
The Certification Process
As we said earlier, Wildix has now held certification as an official AWS partner for months. That already has big connotations — but what exactly goes into the certification process?
Without going into too much detail, it’s effectively a “final test” to prove definitively to Amazon that this particular customer is fully skilled in using their infrastructure.
The main part of that certification comes from Amazon evaluating the Wildix solution. Since 2015, Wildix has worked closely with AWS to build our infrastructure up to their standards, and in June of 2022, this paid off with full certification after an additional evaluation demonstrated to Amazon the Wildix solution was consistently high quality. Of course, this certification comes with Wildix continually giving proof of our commitment to those standards via ongoing infrastructure checks and penetration tests for security.
In addition, Wildix has been attaining certifications for our R&D teams and engineers. As most engineers and programmers already know, AWS also features individual accreditations for specific fields and at multiple levels of expertise. Wildix staff has long been encouraged to gain this certification, and as of January 2023, a third of our internal engineers are fully AWS certified, with over 70% of our developers having at least begun training. Of course, we plan to invest further in this education with additional training and exams.
At nearly every level possible, then, Wildix can attest to official recognition from Amazon in effective use of its web services. And, of course, that means a great deal on the user end.
Takeaways From Certification
What certification means for Wildix, above all, is the ability to establish greater trust. Thanks to the confidence from AWS that certification conveys, it’s far easier to approach large corporations with the Wildix solution from standpoints of status, reliability and, most of all, security.
And these qualities aren’t just honorary, of course. As said before, a great deal of in-depth evaluation goes into establishing this certification — in effect, it’s shorthand to the end-user that a certified solution has all these marks of quality. With that mark, there’s less risk in trusting that Wildix is up to the standards organizations need in cloud-based communications.
In fact, Wildix can appeal toUS public-linked institutions thanks to our certification in GovCloud, AWS’s branch specifically designed to handle government and related organizations’ data. With this on hand as well, it’s easier to establish trust for institutions with particularly strict data regulation standards, again simply through the status that certification conveys.
Now and into the future, working alongside AWS has done a great deal for Wildix in terms of both how we can deliver the solution and how it’s perceived by customers. It’s been a prosperous relationship, and we’re excited to see where else it will lead.
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