Using AWS, the Met Office has been able to increase agility, speed, and scalability while reducing costs. Tomkins reports that infrastructure provisioning has gone from months to minutes and getting data to a customer now takes 10 seconds instead of 10 minutes. “Our data storage now scales almost linearly by 1,000 percent, whereas the previous architecture could not support a 50 percent increase,” says Tomkins. “In addition, iterating our solution architecture removed more than 50 percent of the cost of our initial design for our on-premises solution.”

The organization is confident in the security of its data and its accreditation team is enthusiastic about the monitoring and auditing capabilities provided by AWS tools, at a maturity level the Met Office could not deliver as cost-effectively. “A number of the best-practice security patterns are achievable with the call of an API,” says Tomkins. “We can script and automate for a high degree of consistency. We can isolate systems and tightly control access. These capabilities are harder to achieve in our internal environment but are available out of the box with AWS.”

The Met Office takes advantage of AWS services to provision infrastructure and deploy applications onto that infrastructure. The automation of traditionally time-consuming workloads enables the organization to iterate and release new applications 30 times more frequently—a game-changing opportunity. In addition, the Met Office can rapidly scale up when the workload grows and then shut down resources that are no longer required. “With AWS, we can scale to distribute and serve a large quantity of data to a large number of computers,” Tomkins says.

By adopting AWS, the Met Office has been able to innovate and experiment to a degree previously impossible. For example, in one day, the organization easily compared the performance and cost-effectiveness of three different AWS storage backend solutions. “We wouldn’t have been able to compare those options on-premises because of the lead times involved,” says Tomkins. “By using AWS, we could very easily provision those services, run some tests, and tear them down again. Without the cloud, it would have taken months (and actually, we wouldn’t have done it all). Now we can fail fast and fail cheaply in terms of trying different architectures.”

In a world of technology disruption where the landscape of new opportunities includes the Internet of Things, big data analytics, and machine learning, the field of meteorology is very interested in innovation. “We collect and generate huge volumes of data that is of limited use to people until we can deliver services that provide consumable information,” says Tomkins. “We need to be innovative if we are to keep up with the way people consume our data. We are using the AWS Cloud to drive the mass-market availability of customizable weather information.”