What is a Well-Architected Framework?

July 7, 2022

Why is Well-Architected Important?

Did you know that Customer Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is the most frequent and costly record type compromised? See IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2020. The average cost of a PII data breach is staggering; $3.86M for the data breach, $150 cost-per-record of Customer PII, and an additional cost of $175 per record of Customer PII in breaches caused by a malicious attack. Furthermore, the harm done to your company’s reputation may be irreparable. Architecting successful workloads (following the Well-Architected Framework) can help you proactively avoid loss of trust and the expensive aftermath of breaches.

Benefits of Well-Architected Framework

A Well-Architected Framework (WAF)enables cloud solution success by providing architecture guidance and best practices to improve the quality of workloads. Five key tenants of WAF are:

• Cost-Optimization: Focus on generating incremental value early. Apply the principles of Build-Measure-Learn, to accelerate your time to market while avoiding capital-intensive solutions. Look for ways to reduce unnecessary expenses and improve operational efficiencies.
• Operational Excellence: Design reliable, predictable, automated deployments with monitoring and performance management. Automate deployments to reduce the chance of human error. Fast and routine deployment processes won’t slow the release of new features or bug fixes. Equally important, you must quickly roll back or forward if an update has problems.
• Performance Efficiency: The ability of your workload to scale to meet the demands placed on it by users efficiently. Lower maintenance costs, improve user experience, and increase agility by architecting solutions with scalability baked-in. Move to PaaS by default to use built-in scaling functionality.
• Reliability: Scale-out instead of scaling up expensive hardware and build reliability across deployments with resilient HA applications and failure mode analysis. Automate all aspects of your cloud solution to improve reliability further and minimize the possibility and consequence of human errors.  
• Security: Build with security by design to provide confidentiality, integrity, and availability assurances against deliberate attacks and abuse of your valuable data and systems. Think about security throughout the entire lifecycle of an application, from design and implementation to deployment and operations. 

Next Steps

If you have moved to the cloud or are thinking about moving, our experts can help ensure your applications and systems are designed in scalable, resilient, efficient, and secure ways. We understand there is no “one-size fits all approach”; we start by evaluating where you are today and what you need. We focus on balancing and aligning your business requirements with the technical capabilities required to execute those requirements, considering risk, costs, and overall priorities. Give us a call today to start employing the Well-Architected Framework.