Making data-driven decisions is an integral step in any business. With enterprise data spread across multiple sources, in databases and data warehouses, extracting insight from this data in a secure cloud-based environment is part of its digital transformation journey.
A critical business requirement is obtaining analytical insights in an easy-to-understand, interactive, and visual format. This is where Amazon QuickSight comes in.
How to learn QuickSight? Take an AWS SysOps certification and learn how to implement cloud initiatives. AWS SysOps training is part of the SysOps Administrator and DevOps Engineer career pathways. The amazon web services certification validates that “a candidate has the experience and skills to contribute and ‘hit the ground running within a team supporting an AWS Cloud environment.”
With AWS taking over the cloud market, the talent demand for cloud skills in the AWS ecosystem is on a steep rise.
What is Amazon QuickSight, and what does it do?
Amazon QuickSight is a machine learning-powered business intelligence (BI) service built for cloud users, architected within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) framework. It is built as a data visualization platform for smart, informed decisions.
QuickSight is a fully managed cloud service connecting data from different data points. As it is served within the AWS umbrella and is device agnostic, AWS QuickSight can support thousands of users without additional infrastructure, rendering it highly scalable. For easy functionality, Amazon QuickSight provides user-management tools without the need for extra infrastructure deployment.
The natural language processing (NLP) capability supports a built-in dictionary and feedback system for user queries. This ML-powered mechanism does away with the necessity of pre-build data sets and models. Users can identify outliers and hidden trends in the data, discover significant business drivers and perform analysis and forecasting without coding or prior technical expertise.
QuickSight’s interactive dashboard facilitates data exploration, extraction, and insights for data-driven decision-making. The interface is easy to use for visualization, analysis, and publication of reports. It allows the seamless embedding of the dashboard into applications and websites for easy visualization and predictions.
The multi-region availability in the AWS platform supports dashboard distribution across multiple users with the underlying in-memory SPICE (super-fast parallel in-memory calculation engine) for fast data retrieval and simultaneous analyses.
With QuickSight, you can use AWS data, third-party data, streaming data, SaaS data, spreadsheet data, and much more.
Benefits of using Amazon QuickSight
Amazon QuickSight is a very fast, easy to use, cloud-service for all your big data and analytics needs on the go. It can handle data-intensive workloads, such as IoT device stream and clickstream analysis at a fraction of the cost of on-premise solutions.
AWS QuickSight offers the following advantages:
Easy to use
QuickSight can be easily downloaded and used. All you need to do is install the app. No complex server set-ups are involved.
AWS QuickSight is portable as it can be accessed any time from any place and any device. Its mobile-optimized experience supports features like drill-downs, filters, forecasting, email alerts, and collaborative sharing.
The flexibility in cloud design allows users to play with the massive data and generate visualizations in seconds.
Pulls data from many Amazon utilities
Amazon QuickSight pulls and reads data from many Amazon utilities, such as Athena and Redshift.
It also assimilates with on-premises databases and IoT devices. End users can upload incremental data in a file or an AWS S3 bucket.
Automated insights powered by Machine Learning
Data-driven insights powered by machine learning enable automated forecasting, anomaly detection, and trends identification to drive business decisions.
Fast performance
The SPICE engine is a super-fast, in-memory, calculation engine that is easy to use. Large amounts of data can be queried, processed, and analyzed simultaneously at high speeds. It automatically replicates data for ready availability saving time and money.
The SPICE facilitates the calculation of data at lightning speeds.
Smart interactive visualizations
The AWS QuickSight provides various types of visualization for you to generate customized reports and insights. You can easily publish dashboards and easily control features available in those dashboards.
Its built-in visualization tool generates suggestions and patterns in the backend data sets for modeling accurate processes. The ‘Autograph’ feature enables accurate data analyses based on your historical analytical patterns.
The Dashboard is intuitive and is easy to understand. It also recommends the most appropriate types of graphs according to the inputs given. You can share your visualizations with colleagues and create a storyboard around your Data.
Self-service analyses
The GUI on the dashboard allows self-service exploratory analytics: visualizing all analyses and saving them as stories for sharing with others in the organization. This allows a variety of data from multiple sources to be combined into a single analysis
Highly scalable
QuickSight is used in various businesses for the independent measure of business metrics. It can be scaled across tens of thousands of users for simultaneous data processing and visualization.
Low total cost
The pay-per-session model is easy on the pocket of consumers as they do not incur upfront costs for licensing.
Ability to embed dashboards and APIs
With single sign-on and APIs, users can embed the dashboards into applications and web portals without the need to write code.
Data source compatibility
QuickSight is compatible with multiple data sources: native AWS services, private cloud, SaaS applications, csv files, third-party databases, relational data sources like Amazon Athena, API-based data sources like Salesforce, and more.
It supports auto-discovery of your AWS data sources for easy connections.
Multi-region availability
The distributed dashboards and insights allow access and simultaneous analysis to multiple users, with role-based access control and multi-region industry compliance such as HIPAA.
Security
AWS QuickSight allows granular permission to AWS data, with row-level access, data encryption at rest, and access to private on-premise data or AWS virtual private cloud (or VPC).
Partner BI integration
QuickSight provides AWS BI partners with a SQL-like interface for querying the data stored in SPICE, allowing you to use your other BI tools from AWS Partners and benefit from the faster performance of SPICE at the same time.
Its ability to integrate users, groups, or AWS Directory Service are advantages for enterprise use.
Conclusion
The Amazon QuickSight is a powerful, cloud-based Business Intelligence tool and part of the AWS learning curve. IT professionals who want to carve a career in cloud computing may opt for AWS SysOps training for a lucrative career.
