Annese & Associates: Successful Cloud Solutions Leveraging AWS

Rus Healy, Chief Technology Architect

“Cloud solutions have reached a level of maturity that makes them not only viable but also imperative to fold into business strategies,” says Rus Healy, Chief Technology Architect of Annese & Associates. It was in the year 2014, Annese integrated with the Amazon Web Services’ Partner Network and became an authorized AWS channel reseller, officially launching its Cloud Practice to the next level. Two years later, when The AWS Public Sector Partner Program recognized companies with strong overall AWS practices, demonstrating their expertise in serving clients, Annese made it straight into the list. This shows the journey of Annese as an Amazon partner and the trust that their clients have shown in the firm. Perceiving the potential of the cloud to break down geographic and business barriers, Annese offers valuable services to its customers through guidance and consultative practices—developing long-term cloud strategies.

Annese’s cloud practice includes consulting, architecture, implementation, and managed services. By leveraging AWS for a large portion of its cloud services and management portfolio, the firm offers enterprise customers fast and flexible access to the cloud, and moreover, the ability to run their applications on the AWS Cloud, leveraging its shared security model. The company has also done a lot of architecture and deployment work related to security environments, including PCI and HIPAA environments.

Their customer intimacy strategy allows Annese to anticipate their customers’ needs and develop their practices to provide desired solutions and products

Annese’s disaster recovery and business continuity services cater to multiple markets of different sizes.

Serving medium-sized and large scale enterprises alike, Annese delivers storage for backup, archive, and video surveillance via cloud technology. One such instance was when Annese aligned with CloudEndure to help one of their healthcare clients with migration and disaster recovery. They had three hospitals, a primary data center with 600 servers in it, and a secondary data center that was undersized and outdated. Annese proposed a CloudEndure disaster recovery solution on AWS which gave them a two minute recovery point objective and 1-hour recovery time objective—showing the viability of six stage servers solution.

Annese’s active cloud practice has an excellent track record, and many cloud-based solutions, especially IaaS and PaaS. “Our partnership with AWS is of great significance as it encourages our clients to adopt additional AWS services apart from AWS Direct Connect which adds unique value to our customer base,” Healy says. Using AWS WorkSpaces products for desktops in the cloud, Annese allows customers to connect from any part of the world via high-speed connectivity from their desktop.

Moreover, the company has also made an ongoing consulting connection with their clients, helping them understand how AWS works. The company conducts whiteboard sessions with customers to help them understand how cloud solutions work in the field of compliance and security, and how Annese has architected their solutions.

Working with customers across New York State and the Northeast, Annese plans to expand its cloud-based practice significantly.