Why Should You Move to Managed Search in the Cloud?
Building an Enterprise Search on AWS using Elasticsearch takes a lot of time and talent. We offer a better solution.
Elasticsearch is a super fast open source search and analytics engine that can handle all types of data. It offers a lot of advantages, but its reliability, speed and scalability top the list. Hosting Elasticsearch in the cloud amplifies all of those advantages and adds a great deal of flexibility. That said, migrating enterprise search to the cloud and then managing it once it’s there requires dedicated resources and specialized skills. Building and maintaining your own crawlers, connectors, search user interfaces, user security and management console is time consuming and expensive.
Why choose a managed service?
“This is tedious, time-consuming work for engineers who should focus on core business functions,” explains Timo Selvaraj, SearchBlox’s VP of product. When your teams are worried about configuring infrastructure, syncing search software, securing management APIs, managing upgrades and designing a user interface, they are not innovating. “They’re caring for your infrastructure instead of working on your core business.” says Selvaraj. Using a fully managed service allows organizations to be productive from day one and assures them of a support structure with an SLA.
We advise clients to answer the following questions before deciding to self-manage Elasticsearch-based enterprise search in the cloud:
- How big of a team will you need?
- Will you hire new engineers to staff that team or transfer engineers from other teams? If the answer is the latter, how will you replace those engineers? How much will that cost (both in terms of time and money)?
- What training do your teams require to do this job? How much will that training cost? How long will it take for them to get certified?
- How much will it cost to create monitoring and support SLAs? How long will that take?
- Have you considered networking, backup and restoration, and disaster recovery costs? How much would downtime cost your business?
- What is the cost of building and maintaining the connectors, crawlers and pipelines for data ingestion?
- What expertise do you need to build secure search interfaces and provide fine-grained user level access?
- (For more information about securing Elasticsearch in the Cloud, see this blog post.)
- What skills does your team need for the current and future development of enterprise search and artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing capabilities?
“If you’re not thinking about all of this, you’re really not considering the total cost of ownership,” explains Selvaraj. “And, the most important question of all is this: what are the opportunity costs of managing your own enterprise search on AWS? In other words, what are you not doing when you’re doing this?”
“Our enterprise customers want all the benefits of search in the cloud without the management hassles,” explains Selvaraj. “They want to offload enterprise search operations to experts. They want the security and support that a service level agreement offers.” At SearchBlox, that product is Fully Managed Enterprise Search.
What’s different about SearchBlox’s Fully Managed Enterprise Search on AWS?
The idea behind our Fully Managed Enterprise Search on AWS is simple: we manage your scalable search in the cloud so you can manage your business. That said, we do a few things differently.
We include unlimited queries.
Most vendors cap queries or offer tiered pricing based on query volume, which makes it hard to compare total cost of ownership. Query volume can be impossible to predict. Just ask the World Health Organization (WHO), one of our clients. In the first month of the COVID-19 pandemic, WHO saw a 10X increase in search traffic on their site. But thanks to our Fully Managed Enterprise Search on AWS, their search costs remained the same.
We offer fixed, flat-fee pricing.
Go ahead and compare prices, if you can. But chances are you’ll notice that most search companies can’t give you a straight answer. They offer resource-based pricing, which is hard to budget for, or they ask you to “call for details.” Not us. If you visit our product page, you’ll see exactly how much we charge. We want you to understand what your spend is from the outset so you can budget accordingly. No one likes surprises, so we eliminate the risks of resource-based pricing; you only have to consider the number of URLs/documents for limits.
We decrease your time to value.
In a new ebook from Amazon Web Services (AWS) called Cloud for CEOs, Adrian Cockroft, VP of cloud architecture strategy, declares that time to value is the most critical innovation metric. “When your teams invest in work, how long does it take for that work to create customer value?” he asks. “For most enterprises, time to value is measured in months,” he explains, adding that such a slow pace is unacceptable. “The speed at which data is available dictates the speed at which decisions can be made.” We get it. And we can migrate your search to the cloud in a matter of days. That’s why leaders like WHO, Mayo Clinic Labs, BB&T, Cardinal Financial, Netgear and Arlo choose us for their zero-downtime solution and 24/7 support.