AWS Data Portfolio Review

In a world of big data, Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a comprehensive solution to help you migrate, house and analyze your data.

AWS is one of the leading data management solution providers on the market. Let’s review some of the core data products in its large portfolio:

Data migration

AWS offers a comprehensive data migration tool designed to move data from on- premises infrastructure to the cloud, quickly, securely and efficiently. 

Using a combination of its own and third-party tools, the tool enables businesses to accelerate and simplify the data migration journey and see results.

It has had more than a million active customers since 2006 and leads the market, in terms of the speed and efficiency of their migration solutions.

Those customers that used AWS data migration services saw an average cost reduction of 31%, a threefold increase in features delivered each year, 43% fewer security incidents, and a 69% reduction in unplanned downtime, according to AWS.

Its migration services include:

• Migration evaluator
• Migration hub
• Application discovery service
• Server migration service
• Database migration service
• Application migration service
• AWS data synch

Databases

AWS offers a selection of over 15 purpose built database engines to support a diverse range of data models. 

Each of these databases is fully managed and includes tasks such as provisioning, patching, configuration and backups.

Relational databases are available up to five times faster than common alternatives, while non-relational databases offer micro-second to sub-milli-second latency. Solutions are scalable, so users can grow their resources with no downtime.

The products help companies break free from legacy solutions, build modern apps and move to a high-performance, high-availability managed database. 

Database types

• Relational: Traditional applications, such as ERP, CRM and e-commerce
• Key value: High-traffic web apps, including e-commerce systems and gaming applications
• In memory: Caching, session management, gaming leaderboards and geo-spatial applications
• Document: Content management, catalogs and user profiles
• Wide column: High-scale industrial apps for equipment maintenance, fleet management, and route optimization
• Graph: Fraud detection, social networking, and recommendation engines
• Time series: IoT applications, DevOps, industrial telemetry
• Ledger: Systems of record, supply chain, registrations, banking transactions

Data analytics

AWS data analytics offers a way to get your data to all your users.

It has a broad portfolio of offerings that feature data analytics, including: 

• Amazon Glue: provides comprehensive discovery services that allow you to combine, move and replicate data across multiple stores for data analytics. 
• Amazon Redshift: allows you to query data
• Amazon EMR: allows you to process large volumes of data for analytics 

With capabilities such as centralized access control and column level filtering, AWS gives users the ability to organize, authorize and control access to data across an organization for analytics.

These services can deliver real-time benefits, such as:

• The ability to run complex analytical queries on structured and unstructured data
• Collect, analyze and stream data for real-time analytics
• Process vast quantities of data in your data lake or on-premises

See more: Google Data Portfolio Review

Data use cases

AWS has been used by some of the biggest companies in the world for analytics, including Netflix, 3M, T-Mobile, Epic Games, Adobe and Pfizer.

J.D. Power, for example, built a 120 TB data lake in Amazon S3 with 1,500 schemes. It used products such as Glue, RedShift and Athena to deliver data insights that would not have been possible using a traditional group of siloed databases.

Pfizer used AWS to build its scientific data cloud. This solved the problem it and other organizations faced in finding the data they needed within its systems. This dark data had previously only been discoverable by physically speaking to colleagues. Using AWS, it created a large data lake to ensure the data could be accessed by all users.

Sallie Mae, a bank that provides students with financial services and advice, used AWS data migration services to move data from collocated servers to the AWS cloud. AWS provided the security and compliance a financial institution needed. AWS worked closely with the bank, handling the migration and moved quickly to solve challenges as they arose. Sallie Mae reduced downtime and maintenance by about 30% and reduced incidents by 50%. AWS handles between 60% and 70% of the client’s data capacity.

20th Century Fox previously announced it had extended its relationship with AWS in a move that would see AWS provide the majority of the client’s key platforms. 20th Century Fox introduced a broad company-wide approach to data collection, using products such as S3 and Glue to access data across the organization. AWS Redshift was used for fast analytics, while Kinesis enabled it to collect, process and analyze data in real-time.

User reviews

AWS’ data services benefit from some of the best user ratings in the sector. 

Users give the AWS migration service 4.4 stars out of five at G2. They particularly like the speed, efficiency, and ease of use the system offers.

Analytics solutions, such as Quick Insights, are popular with users for their speed and ease of use. It receives four stars out of five at G2.

Users give AWS Glue 4.4 stars out of five at Gartner Peer Insights, with praise for its ability to support large quantities of data and multiple integrations.

See more: SAP Data Portfolio Review