AWS Announces Amazon DataZone

At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced Amazon DataZone, a new data management service that makes it faster and easier for customers to catalog, discover, share, and govern data stored across AWS, on-premises, and third-party sources. With Amazon DataZone, administrators and data stewards who oversee an organization’s data assets can manage and govern access to data using fine-grained controls to ensure it is accessed with the right level of privileges and in the right context. Amazon DataZone makes it easy for engineers, data scientists, product managers, analysts, and business users to access data throughout an organization so they can discover, use, and collaborate with data to derive insights. To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/datazone.

Organizations today collect petabytes, and even exabytes, of data spread across multiple departments, services, on-premises databases, and third-party sources (e.g., partner solutions and public datasets). Before organizations can unlock the full value of this data, administrators and data stewards (i.e., data producers) who generate and manage data need to make it accessible, while maintaining control and governance to ensure it can only be accessed by the right person and in the right context. Simultaneously, employees across the company (i.e., data consumers) want to discover and analyze information from data producers to drive their decision making. Organizations must balance the need for control, to ensure data remains secure, with the need for access, to drive new insights, but it is challenging to implement governance policies that take into account the variety of data, departments, and use cases across an organization. Some businesses build catalogs to curate their information, but these systems are time consuming to maintain, require data producers to manually label each dataset with additional context (e.g., origin and description) to make it discoverable, and lack built-in access controls to make governance simple. Organizations also struggle to enforce a consistent data taxonomy, and individual data producers must keep their own information in sync, which makes it hard to search for data across an organization and can lead to information becoming stale. Even if a data consumer finds the information they need, they do not have a simple way to request access from the owner directly from the catalog, to load the data into analytics services, and to collaborate with others. As a result, decision-makers cannot get the information they need in a timely manner, or they may make poor decisions based on incomplete or outdated data.