With more than 34% market share of the entire global cloud – larger than its next three competitors combined – Amazon Web Services’ position on the market is dominant. AWS offers a wide variety of services, everything from content distribution networks to SQL databases to its wildly popular Elastic Cloud Computing, or EC2.
Some potential Mirror121 users may not realize that it’s possible to replicate Salesforce data to AWS through the use of a Mirror121 installation on an AWS virtual machine. The benefits of such an approach are in flexibility and often in cost.
There’s sometimes a misconception that Mirror121 is software that must be installed on a physical server in a company’s IT infrastructure, but this isn’t the case. Mirror121 is a Java application, and it can be installed anywhere a virtual machine running Windows Server or Linux is installed, and that includes in cloud instances like AWS.
AWS offers a wide variety of options for working with SQL databases in the cloud – everything from Microsoft SQL Server running on an EC2 instance or on its Relational Database Service (RDS) to MySQL on RDS or EC2, Müller explained. This is important because Mirror121 uses an SQL server to store data coming from Salesforce, he added, and this SQL server can be in the cloud.
What it means is that Mirror121 can run entirely on an AWS cloud if a customer wants to use it that way. From Mirror121’s standpoint, it works exactly the same whether it’s installed entirely in a customer’s physical IT infrastructure or entirely in the AWS cloud.
Mirror121 can be installed on an EC2 instance within minutes. What can take longer is data transformation, because the database fields come from Mirror121 unmapped to other applications, and this work may take time depending on what is required.
Once the Salesforce data is in the AWS cloud, it can be easily analysed by business intelligence applications. BI apps such as Tableau work well in an AWS environment – Tableau Server runs seamlessly on AWS – and it’s fairly straightforward to connect Tableau to Amazon data sources.
AWS provides several advantages, including reliability and security, but one of its biggest advantages is flexibility – customers can add or remove capacity as they need it – and this is also true for Mirror121. Customers can change the size of their SQL database pretty quickly on AWS, and Mirror121 can handle that quite stably.
Whether a customer wants to run Mirror121 entirely on their physical corporate IT infrastructure, entirely in the cloud, or something in between, the Mirror121 team is more than happy to meet your requirements.