The Gomo cloud-based authoring tool stands in the company of some of the world’s best-known businesses in taking advantage of Amazon Web Services for eLearning. Read on to discover how this system better ensures eLearning course accessibility and security.
When Amazon Web Services launched in 2006, few could have foreseen the seismic impact it would have. Initially considered an experiment that would mainly excite developers, it has gone on to completely transform technology practices.
For its users, who include big players like Netflix as well as thousands of small and medium-sized businesses, Amazon Web Services has dramatically strengthened IT security.
In 2017, Amazon even announced a new Secret Region for the US Intelligence Community. This enhanced its position as the first and only commercial cloud provider to serve the full range of data classifications used by the US government, including Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret, and Top Secret.
So how has Amazon Web Services gone from an interesting development to the prime choice for organizations such as the CIA?
How Amazon Web Services won over the world
Originally, AWS was simply the engine room of Amazon.
It had been released in a previous form to developers in 2002, with early advocates including Tim O’Reilly, the technological visionary who coined the term Web 2.0.
But it has ultimately given organizations of all sizes access to an incredibly sophisticated method of data storage that can be used at scale – and without incurring the kinds of costs you’d expect in-house.
For example, a business creating, hosting and distributing eLearning through its own servers needs to constantly monitor:
- The capacity of IT teams to maintain systems and safety
- Encryption of sensitive data
- Intrusion and detection systems and policies
- Investment in expensive software and hardware, particularly when upscaling
You still need to bear in mind all of these considerations, together with a range of other sensible security precautions, when using the cloud. But Amazon Web Services for eLearning (and other industries, of course) does a significant amount of the hard work for you, as well as providing your content via the best and most powerful servers in the world.
The benefits of Amazon Web Services for eLearning
Essentially, our use of Amazon Web Services means that the servers for Gomo’s cloud-based architecture are owned by Amazon. You don’t need to download and install software before using our application, because it’s hosted in the cloud.
Gomo’s LMS wrapper already ensures that you never need to worry about large and time-consuming uploads to your LMS or platform. With AWS, you’re also saved from long and complicated eLearning course and software downloads.
Convoluted software installations, license keys, IT permissions and many other headaches of traditional systems are a thing of the past – and, crucially, security is the number-one priority.
At Gomo, we use the Amazon Content Delivery Network (CDN), which is called Amazon Cloudfront. If your learners are on the other side of the world, the CDN takes a copy of the course and distributes it to the nearest servers to their location.
This ensures that your learners experience blistering speed anywhere in the world. It’s powered by Amazon’s technologies, rather than relying on the capabilities of your on-site software and hardware.
How Amazon Web Services uses regions
Our use of Cloudfront, as well as the way the CIA utilizes it, are great examples of Amazon Web Services’ use of regions. Information is replicated so that it is stored in different regions around the world, safeguarding trillions of objects each day and allowing them to be distributed rapidly and instantly.
This data is also super-safe, with a customer promise of 99.999999999% durability. The cloud also rigorously safeguards all the data you store. Amazon estimates that if you store 10,000 objects, you can expect to lose one every ten million years. Not bad compared to the back-up issues many of us have experienced at some point on internal servers.
Taking advantage of Amazon Web Services for eLearning
For most organizations, it makes sense to create ultra-secure learning that can be distributed lightning-fast. But doing that in-house can be a huge demand on resources.
That’s why Amazon Web Services is the number-one choice of an increasingly vast number of companies. When you choose an authoring tool that uses it, you’re ensuring that world-class, ultra-secure technology is behind all of the learning you create.
