Analytic Acceleration: How AWS Unlocks Data for Growing Businesses
The Importance of Data Analytics for Startups and SMBs
Why the Hype Around Analytics?
You may have heard the popular phrase, ‘Data is the new oil.’ In today’s market, data is not only most prevalent, but also one of the most valuable assets to a business because of the information it possesses, and ways it can be leveraged through analytics to drive intelligent future business decisions. Especially for startups and small to medium-sized businesses (SMB).
For startups, budgets are often particularly tight. All companies want to be cost conscious, but even more so for emerging companies. Investors and stakeholders want to ensure their capital is being utilized wisely, and rightfully so. This is why it is so important to have the capabilities to thoroughly analyze the collected data, painting a picture of trends, forecasts, demographics, behavior patterns, needs and pain points. These insights allow startups to create dynamic products, solutions and go-to-market strategies. As the business scales, analytics continues to play a pivotal role in optimizing marketing campaigns, pricing models, product features and more. This results in efficiency and cost optimization by utilizing money and resources in ways that are backed by data driven trends and evidence.
Similar for SMBs, leveraging analytics can lead to smarter business planning. Refined analytics help SMBs identify growth opportunities, manage risks, increase productivity and optimize decisions regarding budgets and operations. For example, analyzing customer data can aid in personalizing marketing content and predicting churn. Analyzing supply chain or inventory data can minimize waste and improve cash flow.
This Makes Sense, Where Do We Start?
For startups and SMBs, making sense of data can seem like an uphill battle. But with the right game plan, these small but mighty companies can conquer their data challenges. It all begins by working backwards, identifying key business goals and determining what questions you want the data to answer. The key is to plan and design not just for immediate needs, but for the future. Analyzing historical data is valuable for identifying patterns, but going one step further and pairing historical data with Machine Learning (ML) models can assist by proactively forecasting trends. However, building a strong and sustainable data foundation can be complex and overwhelming if you do not know where to start or lack team bandwidth. Turning business objectives into reality requires technical knowledge and a well-architected design that not only delivers the desired insights from your data, but is also resilient to failure, highly-available, cost optimized, and secure.
How can AWS Help Us?
As a Senior Solutions Architect, I have worked with dozens of customers in this exact predicament. However, the versatility of AWS makes advanced analytics not only achievable but affordable. Services like S3, Athena, and QuickSight provide easy, affordable data storage, processing, and visualization without upfront infrastructure costs. An array of managed Machine Learning (ML) services such as Amazon Forecast for identifying future trends and SageMaker for custom model training allow tapping into machine learning to be swift and cost efficient. Flexible pricing options like pay-as-you-go and usage tiers scale with unpredictable workloads so your business does not have to over provision resources, resulting in excess spending. Programs like AWS Activate provide credits and support to boost startup productivity. AWS also has additional tailored funding mechanisms specifically for startups and SMBs, aimed to offset costs and show support. Yet even with these benefits, moving to the cloud still requires careful orchestration. This is where Advanced Tier AWS Partners like PREDICTif prove invaluable. Our team of certified experts help SMBs and startups design and deploy tailored analytics solutions on AWS leveraging proven architectures and best practices. We assist with migration planning, solution development, capacity optimization and ongoing operations. With AWS’s innovative platform and guidance from partners like PREDICTif, data analytics success is within reach for growing companies.
Key AWS Services for Establishing a Strong Data Analytic foundation
Amazon QuickSight — A fast, easy to use business intelligence service to create interactive dashboards to visualize data. Helps non-technical users across organizations gain insights without needing data science expertise.
AWS Glue — Fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easy to prepare and load data for analytics. Simplifies and automates difficult data preparation tasks.
Amazon Athena — Serverless query service that makes it easy to analyze data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Useful for ad-hoc analysis and reporting.
Amazon Redshift — Fast, powerful, and cost-effective data warehousing service ideal for aggregating big data sets ideal for BI and machine learning. Integrates seamlessly with most AWS analytics services.
Amazon EMR — Managed Hadoop framework that distributes processing and storage across a resizable cluster. Allows for processing very large sets of structured and semi-structured data.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that analytics should be a core focus area for startups and SMBs looking to innovate faster and outsmart competitors. By leveraging the versatile data analytics services available on AWS, smaller businesses can gain data-driven insights to optimize operations, boost growth and build a competitive edge. The ability to tap into analytics on-demand and affordably via the cloud is a game changer for lean organizations aspiring to punch above their weight.
About PREDICTif Solutions
PREDICTif is an expert in Big Data, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in the Cloud, serving enterprise customers throughout North America. Since 2007, we’ve delivered vision, strategy, execution, and value with our proven methodology and industry-certified, highly professional teams. We have also released a product suite, Intellicision, that helps companies make better, data-formed decisions.