AWS Small and Medium Business (SMB) Competency

AWS Partner has a company overview presentation that sets the stage for customer conversations about their AWS Small and Medium Business (SMB) capabilities and showcases AWS Partner’s demonstration capabilities.

Presentation contains information about the AWS Partner’s AWS Small and Medium Business (SMB) capabilities, including AWS specific differentiators, e.g., what is unique about the AWS Partner’s practice that can only be accomplished leveraging AWS.

Overview presentations contain:

• Company history
• Office locations
• Number of employees
• Customer profile, including number, size, and industries of customers
• Overview of Small and Medium Business (SMB) practice
• Notable AWS projects

Please provide the following as evidence:

• Delivery of presentation by a business development executive at the beginning of the validation session. This should be limited to 15 minutes.

AWS Partner has internal mechanisms for maintaining their consultants' expertise on Small and Medium Business (SMB)-related AWS services and tools.

Please provide the following as evidence:

• List of internal and/or external AWS-focused education events lead by AWS Partner staff (e.g. formal training, lunch and learns, meetups, user groups, etc.) in last 12 months.
• Resources provided by AWS Partner to staff for ongoing AWS skills development

AWS Partner must describe how Small and Medium Business (SMB) opportunities are identified, how their sellers are trained to identify and sell those opportunities, and specific demand generation/lead generation efforts associated to their AWS Small and Medium Business (SMB) practice.

Please provide the following as evidence:

• A description on how the AWS Partner engages with customers, their internal sellers, and AWS sellers if applicable.

AWS Partner must describe how and when they engage with AWS sellers and AWS Solutions Architects.

Please provide the following as evidence:

• A verbal description for how and when they engage AWS sellers or AWS Solutions Architects on an opportunity or in the form of a demonstration of the AWS Opportunity Management tool in AWS Partner Central with sales qualified opportunities submitted (sales qualified = budget, authority, need, timeline, and competition fields completed).

AWS Partner must have a process to ensure that there are sufficient Small and Medium Business (SMB) trained personnel to effectively support customers.

Please provide the following as evidence:

• An established training plan including on-boarding processes that identify job roles (sellers, solutions architects, project managers) and required training paths
• A verbal description of methods used to allocate required resources to Small and Medium Business (SMB) projects

AWS Partner has processes for working with customers to determine and define expected outcomes associated with the projects.

Please provide the following as evidence:

• Project deliverable templates or other resources used for project scoping and definition

AWS Partner has processes to determine scope of work with specific criteria defining customer project with expected deliverables.

Please provide the following as evidence:

• Project templates or other resources(e.g. RACI Matrix) used for project scoping and definition

AWS Partner has standard Statement of Work (SOW) templates for Small and Medium Business (SMB) projects that can be customized to customer needs.

Please provide the following as evidence:

• Default SOW template

AWS Partner assigns Project Manager to each project to ensure project remains on time and within budget.

Please provide the following as evidence:

• Documentation to show that Project Managers were assigned to each of the 4 customer example projects.

AWS Partner has processes to document, manage, and respond to requests for changes to the project scope.

Please provide the following as evidence:

• Documentation of change management practices

AWS Partner has a customer acceptance process.

Please provide the following as evidence:

• Example customer training documents
• SOW language describing handoff responsibilities and acceptance criteria

AWS Partner implements customer satisfaction checkpoints as part of the project plan.

Please provide the following as evidence:

• Project plan and customer satisfaction results for milestone-defined checkpoints

Small & Medium Businesses (SMBs) look for solutions across various use cases that include but are not limited to; 1/Cloud Consulting & Strategy, 2/Infrastructure Migration, 3/Cloud Security & Cost Optimization and 4/Generative AI. The AWS Partner should have an external facing catalog of service offerings covering the diverse set of use cases we find with SMBs.

Provide a detailed description of your top 3 SMB service offerings.

Please include in your response; 1/The underlying use case that is addressed by the solution. 2/What are some of the key AWS services that are typically delivered as part of each offering.

Please include the following evidence; 1/Provide URL of a publicly accessible service offer catalog as described above.

• The optional microsite can be used too to contain this catalog.
• Tier based offer must have differentiators expressed clearly for target audience to support stakeholder engagement and service delivery.

AWS Partners must demonstrate a proven track record of selling AWS solutions to Small and Medium Business (SMB) customers. This ensures partners have the expertise and capability to effectively serve the SMB market segment.

Confirm that your organization has successfully closed and launched at least 50 AWS opportunities with SMB customers, defined as companies with annualized revenue of <$100M and <500 employees (excluding Startups, ISVs, and Digital Native Businesses).

Please include the following in your response: 1/Description of your organization's SMB sales strategy 2/Overview of your SMB customer engagement process 3/Summary of successful SMB customer implementations

Please include the following evidence; 1/A list of 50 ACE Opportunity IDs representing launched SMB opportunities for unique customers with a minimum of $5K ARR PO/AO.

AWS Partners must maintain structured onboarding processes and procedures for personnel who will be involved in SMB service delivery. This ensures consistent service quality and maintains the required AWS expertise within the organization's SMB practice.

Confirm that your organization implements defined onboarding processes and checklists specifically designed for personnel working within your AWS SMB services practice.

Please include the following in your response: 1/Description of your organization's SMB practice onboarding process 2/Overview of required AWS certifications and training programs 3/Timeline and milestones for personnel onboarding completion 4/Method for tracking and validating onboarding progress

Please include the following evidence: 1/Completed onboarding records for personnel in the AWS SMB service practice.

AWS Partners must implement a formal design review process where certified AWS professionals validate all solution architectures. This ensures technical quality and compliance with AWS best practices.

Confirm that all solution designs are reviewed and certified by individuals holding the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional Certification.

Please include the following in your response: 1/ Overview of design review policy and process 2/ Method for tracking reviewer certifications 3/ Process for documenting design approvals

Please include the following evidence: 1/ Documented design review policy

AWS Partners must maintain clear contractual agreements that specify data ownership rights and detailed offboarding procedures for SMB customers. This ensures transparent handling of customer data and smooth transition processes when business relationships conclude.

Confirm that your organization's customer contracts explicitly define data ownership and offboarding procedures, including specific timelines, data transfer methods, and access management protocols.

Please include the following in your response: 1/Description of your data ownership policies

Please include the following evidence: 1/Contract template for SMB service practice that includes: * Data ownership definitions * Specified timeframes for data/account handover * Data transfer format and methodology * Process for removal of IAM accounts, groups, roles, and federation * Customer notification and confirmation procedures

AWS Partners must implement a governance framework to ensure customers achieve and sustain business benefits from their cloud investments.

Describe your organization's customer-aligned governance framework for tracking and realizing business benefits from cloud investments.

Please include the following in your response: 1/Overview of your business value tracking methodology 2/Approach to customer outcome reviews 3/Methods for identifying and addressing value gaps

AWS Partners must implement automated backup systems and perform regular recovery testing to ensure data integrity and meet customer RTO/RPO requirements.

Describe your organization's general strategy to implement automated backup for customer projects.

Please include the following in your response: 1/Process for testing data recovery 2/Method for validating RTO/RPO compliance

AWS Partners must evaluate operational preparedness before deploying customer workloads to production, ensuring processes, procedures, and personnel are fully prepared for production support.

Describe your organization systematic process to assess operational readiness before production deployment of customer workloads.

Please include the following in your response: 1/Overview of pre-production verification steps 2/Approach to personnel readiness assessment

AWS Partners must maintain an automated patch management system to ensure timely and effective deployment of updates across customer applications and infrastructure.

Describe your automated patch management methodology and procedures.

Please include the following in your response: 1/Overview of update deployment scheduling 2/Approach to patch status monitoring and reporting

Please include the following evidence: 1/A video technology demonstration of the patch automation tools in action.

Providing details about who the customer is, their situation and business allows us to establish credibility by providing a degree of authenticity. In addition, this information also allows AWS to verify proper customer alignment to the designation as designations can be aligned with an industry and/or a customer segment.

Provide some background information about the customer; name, industry, size, market segment (Enterprise/SMB/ISV/Startup)?

Note:

• If a public URL for the case study is available, please provide along with your response.
• For anonymous case studies, the customer name can be omitted.

The partner must articulate the customer's critical business challenge that aligns with the specific AWS specialization program's focus area, whether it addresses industry-specific needs, targeted use cases, or specialized workloads. Their documentation must identify both immediate and long-term business risks the customer faced without intervention, supported by quantifiable metrics or concrete business impacts.

The description should establish a clear connection between the customer's challenge and the specialization program's core objectives, demonstrating why this particular case study exemplifies the program's intended scope.

What is the key business challenge for the customer and the risk of not addressing this challenge?

Working backwards from our goals/objectives allows us to formulate an optimal implementation strategy as well as identify the technical solution best suited to meet those goals/objectives. Partners are required to work with the customer to identify what those targets are, but business and technical.

Describe some of the customer's goals and objectives as part of their engagement with your organization.

Each AWS specialization program defines the coverage scope of a domain through definition, distinct categories and/or solution areas. The partner must explicitly articulate how the provided case study meets the definition, category and/or solution area defined by the program by providing substantive evidence demonstrating alignment.

If categories are defined, the case study submission must include a clear mapping between the implemented solution and the chosen specialization category, supported by concrete elements, implementation approaches, and outcomes that validate their solution's fit within the selected category requirements.

Describe how the provided customer reference meets the definitional scope outlined by this competency. If categories are defined then specify which category corresponds to this customer reference and describe why this reference is a good fit for that category.

Note: The competency definition can be found in the introduction tab.

The partner must demonstrate comprehensive technical expertise in their chosen specialization domain through detailed solution documentation that contains an in-depth analysis of service selection decisions, including rationale for choosing specific AWS services over available alternatives. Their technical solution description should directly reference the architecture diagram and explain each component's role in the overall system, establishing clear connections between customer requirements and technical decisions.

Describe the technical solution implemented. Reference the architecture diagram in the explanation.

Please include the following in your response:

1. Justify each service relevant to the designation domain, outlining the analysis of the alternatives considered and rejected.
2. Describe the integration points between different system components

Every business challenge has multiple solutions. AWS prioritizes customer needs, requiring partners to implement solutions that maximize business value while minimizing cost and complexity.

Describe how your solution optimally solves the customer's business challenge and why it was selected amongst the alternatives?

Please include in your response:

1. Description of the alternatives/approaches/options that were considered before arriving at this solution.

Partner solutions implemented for customers must be production grade and live. We measure this by confirming the AWS Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) that the solution is driving. Proof-of-concepts are not acceptable customer references.

What is the estimated AWS ARR and confirm whether it meets the designation revenue requirements (if any)?

Note: Any designation specific revenue prerequisites can be found on the designation checklist website.

AWS Partners are required to understand AWS customer opportunity registration and tracking mechanisms implemented through ACE. The data found through these mechanisms enables AWS to expedite the validation of the customer reference.

If available, please provide the ACE opportunity ID and AWS account ID.

Note: Not providing the ACE opportunity ID and/or AWS account ID may introduce delays in the application processing time or lead to requests for more information from the validation team.

The partner must demonstrate implementation of AWS services specifically relevant to their chosen specialization domain. Their solution documentation must detail which specialized AWS services are utilized, how they are integrated, and what advanced features are activated.

For technology partners with productized offerings, documentation must specify how their solution integrates with and leverages specialized AWS services to enhance their core product capabilities. Partners must provide concrete examples of advanced service features implemented and their direct contribution to solving domain-specific challenges.

For industry specific designations that do not highlight domain specific AWS services, this requirement can be WAIVED.

Confirm which key AWS services is leveraged and/or integrated with in this solution and what advanced capabilities of said services were activated?

The partner must demonstrate solution success through quantifiable metrics that align with the case study documentation.

Their submission must identify and detail at least two specific Key Performance Indicators that directly measure business impact and improvement.

Each KPI must include baseline measurements, improvement targets, actual results, and clear methodology for measurement, providing concrete evidence of how the solution enhanced customer operations.

What two (2) specific KPIs were measured to help improve the customer business?

The partner must candidly identify any challenges that were observed during the implementation providing a through analysis of the lessons learned from these shortfalls, and specific actions taken or planned to address these gaps in future implementations.

This transparency demonstrates the partner's commitment to continuous improvement and ability to adapt solutions based on real-world implementation experiences.

What were some of the challenges observed during this engagement and what is being done to ensure these challenges are mitigated for future customers?

AWS Partner must submit architecture diagrams depicting the overall design and deployment of its AWS Partner solution on AWS as well as any other relevant details of the solution for the specific customer in question.

The submitted diagrams are intended to provide context to the AWS Solutions Architect conducting the Technical Validation. It is critical to provide clear diagrams with an appropriate level of detail that enable the AWS Solutions Architect to validate the other requirements listed below.

Each architecture diagram must show:

• All of the AWS services used
• How the AWS services are deployed, including virtual private clouds (VPCs), availability zones, subnets, and connections to systems outside of AWS.
• Elements deployed outside of AWS, e.g. on-premises components, or hardware devices.
• how design scales automatically - Solution adapts to changes in demand. The architecture uses services that automatically scale such as Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront, AWS Auto Scaling, and AWS Lambda.
• how design has high availability with multi-AZ or multi-region deployment. When intentional tradeoffs have been made (e.g. to optimize cost in favor of high availability), please explain the customer's requirements.

Please provide the following as evidence (required for all provided customer examples):

• An architecture diagram depicting the overall design and deployment of your solution on AWS.
• Explanation of how the major solutions elements will keep running in case of failure.
• Description of how the major solutions elements scale up automatically.

AWS expects all Services Partners to be prepared to create AWS accounts and implement basic security best practices. Even if most of your customer engagements do not require this, you should be prepared in the event you work with a customer who needs you to create new accounts for them.

Establish internal processes regarding how to create AWS accounts on behalf of customers when needed, including:

• When to use root account for workload activities
• Enable MFA on root
• Set the contact information to corporate email address or phone number
• Enable CloudTrail logs in all region and protect CloudTrail logs from accidental deletion with a dedicated S3 bucket

Please provide the following as evidence:

• Documents describing Security engagement SOPs which met all the 4 criteria defined above. Acceptable evidence types are security training documents, internal wikis, or standard operating procedures documents.
• Description of how Secure AWS Account Governance is implemented in one (1) of the submitted customer examples.

Define standard approach to access customer-owned AWS accounts, including:

• Both AWS Management Console access and programmatic access using the AWS Command Line Interface or other custom tools.
• When and how to use temporary credentials such as IAM roles
• Leverage customer's existing enterprise user identities and their credentials to access AWS services through Identity Federation or migrating to AWS Managed Active Directory

Establish best practices around AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and other identity and access management systems, including:

• IAM principals are only granted the minimum privileges necessary. Wildcards in Action and Resource elements should be avoided as much as possible.
• Every AWS Partner individual who accesses an AWS account must do so using dedicated credentials

Please provide the following as evidence:

• Security engagement Standard Operation Procedure (SOP) which met all the 2 criteria defined above. Acceptable evidence types are: security training documents, internal wikis, standard operating procedures documents. Written descriptions in the self-assessment excel is not acceptable.
• Description of how IAM best practices are implemented in one (1) of the submitted customer examples.

AWS Partner has defined metrics for determining the health of each component of the workload and provided the customer with guidance on how to detect operational events based on these metrics.

Establish the capability to run, monitor and improve operational procedure by:

• Defining, collecting and analyzing workload health metrics w/AWS services or 3rd Party tool
• Exporting standard application logs that capture errors and aid in troubleshooting and response to operational events.
• Defining threshold of operational metrics to generate alert for any issues

Please provide the following as evidence:

• Standardized documents or guidance on how to develop customer workload health KPIs with the three components above
• Description of how workload health KPIs are implemented in (1) of the submitted customer examples.

Create a runbook to document routine activities and guide issue resolution process with a list of operational tasks and troubleshooting scenarios covered that specifically addresses the KPI metrics defined in OPE-001.

Please provide the following as evidence:

• Standardized documents or runbook met the criteria defined above.

Deployments are tested or otherwise validated before being applied to the production environment. For example, DevOps pipelines used for the project for provisioning resources or releasing software and applications.

Use a consistent approach to deploy to customers including:

• A well-defined testing process before launching in production environment
• Automated testing components

Please provide the following as evidence:

• A deployment checklist example or written descriptions met all the criteria defined above.

Establish internal processes regarding how to secure traffic within VPC, including:

• Security Groups to restrict traffic between Internet and Amazon VPC
• Security Groups to restrict traffic within the Amazon VPC
• Network ACL to restrict inbound and outbound traffic
• Other AWS security services to protect network security

Please provide the following as evidence:

• Written descriptions/documents on network security best practices met the criteria defined above.
• Description of how network security is implementation in one (1) of the submitted customer examples.

Establish internal processes regarding a data encryption policy used across all customer projects

• Summary of any endpoints exposed to the Internet and how traffic is encrypted
• Summary of processes that make requests to external endpoints over the Internet and how traffic is encrypted
• Enforcing encryption at rest. By default you should enable the native encryption features in an AWS service that stores data unless there is a reason not to.

All cryptographic keys are stored and managed using a dedicated key management solution

Please provide the following as evidence:

• Data encryption and key management policy met the criteria defined above.
• Description of how data encryption is implementation in one (1) of the submitted customer examples.

Changes to infrastructure are automated for customer implementation

• Tools like AWS CloudFormation, the AWS CLI, or other scripting tools were used for automation.
• Changes to the production environment were not done using the AWS Management Console.

Please provide the following as evidence:

• Written description of deployment automation and an example template (e.g., CloudFormation templates, architecture diagram for CI/CD pipeline) met the criteria defined above.

Incorporate resilience discussion and advise a RTO&PRO target when engaging with customer. Customer acceptance and adoption on RTO/RPO is not required.

• Establish a process to establish workload resilience including:
• RTO & RPO target
• Explanation of the recovery process for the core components of the architecture
• Customer awareness and communication on this topic

Please provide the following as evidence:

• Descriptions or documents on workload resilience guidance met the three criteria defined above
• Description of how resilience is implementation in one (1) of the submitted customer examples including reasons for exception when RTO&RPO is not defined

Determine solution costs using right sizing and right pricing for both technical and business justification.

Conducted TCO analysis or other form of cost modelling to provide the customer with an understanding of the ongoing costs including all the following 3 areas:

• Description of the inputs used to estimate the cost of the solution
• Summary of the estimates or cost model provided to the customer before implementation
• Business value analysis or value stream mapping of AWS solution

Please provide the following as evidence:

• Description of how to develop cost analysis or modeling with the critical components defined above
• Cost analysis example in one (1) of the submitted customer examples. Acceptable evidence types are: price calculator link, reports or presentations on business values analysis