Understanding your business intelligence with Amazon QuickSight

Author: Neeraj Iyer

This article is part of a series, this first article will explore what Amazon Quicksight is and the business intelligence it can provide. The second article will discuss the functionality, features and capabilities of Amazon Quicksight.

What is Amazon QuickSight?

Amazon QuickSight is an Amazon Web Service (AWS) platform built for the cloud that enables customers to understand their data and strengthen their business intelligence (BI). QuickSight is a scalable, serverless, embeddable and machine learning (ML) powered business intelligence service. With QuickSight it is easy to create and publish dashboards that include ML powered insights and can be accessed from any device. QuickSight is serverless, meaning it can scale to tens of thousands of users without the need of any infrastructure. Quicksight also offers a variety of innovative features through which customers can create interactive dashboards, the image below displays what a sample QuickSight dashboard looks like.

Why do you need Business Intelligence (BI)?

Business intelligence can allow business leaders to feel more connected to their data, helping them simplify interactions and identify business trends and problems that need to be addressed to streamline their operations. BI ensures users can reduce the need for manual consolidation, improving productivity and connecting them to their data to get useful insights from it. Dashboards are the visual representation of this data, and can include some of the following benefits:

• Customization: Users can customize dashboards in terms of users and their expectations
• Interactive: Filter, sort and interact based on preferences
• Data transparency: Dashboards offer data transparency as data is the most important asset
• All in-one: In the past users spent a large amount of time reviewing and analyzing different reports. With advanced tools and features, QuickSight streamlines all reports in one dashboard
• Advanced features: Dashboards can be embedded into applications, viewed on mobile devices and customized using different Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)

Why does serverless matter?

The table below compares a server-based BI versus QuickSight, which is a serverless BI. With a server-based BI, when more users get added, more servers need to be added and managed. QuickSight automatically scales based on the number of users, so even if the number of users increases or the dashboard becomes more complex the performance will remain the same.

If a new user needs access to the dashboard in another country, there is no need for a manual launch or management of the servers in that country. QuickSight dashboards deploy across multiple availability zones and regions with paying required for only that particular session, saving time and money.

The true total cost of ownership for a server-based BI includes the license, infrastructure and management cost; with QuickSight the true cost of ownership is just the session price.

Table 1: Server-based versus serverless
Below outlines the differences between a server-based BI & QuickSight

Table 2: Amazon QuickSight features
Below outlines some of the features Quicksight provides, the second article in this series will dive deeper into the functionalities of Amazon QuickSight.

Benefits of Baker Tilly's AWS collaboration:

Successful digital transformation requires forward thinking in both market trajectory and advanced technology. This is what Baker Tilly offers through our AWS collaboration. Our digital team provides a strategic lens to help organizations assess and pursue digital capabilities that align to business goals. With vast knowledge of the digital world, AWS contributes powerful solutions, like Amazon QuickSight, that help drive successful digital transformation.

Baker Tilly can help organizations fully leverage Amazon QuickSight based on their technology portfolio, product strategy, governance and operational design. Connect with our team to learn more about Amazon QuickSight and our AWS collaboration.