Data-driven organizations seek truth by treating data like an organizational asset, no longer the property of individual departments. Making data securely and easily accessible to employees across the organization—not just data scientists or developers—helps improve business outcomes and increases innovation, reports WSJ.
Unifying data silos
Combining data allows organizations to access new insights they’ve never had before and ensures all employees are working from a single source of truth. For organizations that have to manage on-premises infrastructure, where datasets are often in different places and managed by different teams, creating a common repository for collecting, categorizing, and analyzing data is a challenge.
Moving to the cloud makes it easier to manage and govern data centrally because all the tools and data stores are managed in one place. This also increases its business agility so that it can respond to the unexpected faster.
Securing and governing data
Some organizations are slow to open their data to more employees because they’re concerned about data security and governance. Traditional data architectures require complicated access management procedures because data is accessed from so many different places, which also introduces risk.
Granting, tracking, and removing employee access to different data stores and auditing who has access to what to remain in compliance with a growing number of regulations is a full-time job. In fact, many larger organizations have entire departments dedicated to this.
The cloud allows organizations to automate manual security tasks so that they can shift their focus to innovating their business. Also, organizations have granular control and visibility over who accesses data and for what purpose. This makes access management and governance easier. And to help our customers satisfy compliance requirements, AWS maintains more security standards and compliance certifications than any other cloud provider.
All about BI’s and dashboards
Empowering employees to make better decisions means not just giving them access to data, but to insights as well. For example, many of our customers use business intelligence (BI) tools so that all employees and stakeholders (not just technical ones) can quickly and easily find the insights most useful to them. And many of our BI tools utilize machine learning (ML) to make predictions to further aid in decision making.
For example, the NFL uses Amazon QuickSight, a scalable, ML-powered BI service to gain greater insight internally in order to open a window for fans to engage with data. It provides dashboards to its clubs, broadcasters, editorial folks, and fantasy football writers at NFL.com to ask questions, run extremely fast queries, and surface the answers.
Those dashboards, which used to take hours or days to build, can now be created in minutes. Additionally, the NFL can then take these insights and apply them to different parts of the organization, helping coaches create better game plans and improving player safety.
Less time looking for data, more time innovating
By making data and insights more accessible to all employees and stakeholders, organizations can achieve their goals faster and improve business outcomes. Because they spend less time and resources managing access and digging through data and more time getting value from their data to create differentiated products and services for their customers.
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Source: WSJ
