Seattle, USA: Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced its new service AWS Data Exchange that makes it easy for millions of AWS customers to securely find, subscribe to, and use third-party data in the cloud.
Reuters, Change Healthcare, Dun & Bradstreet, TransUnion, Foursquare, Pitney Bowes and Virtusa are among the many qualified data providers leveraging AWS Data Exchange service.
Reuters for instance, curates data from over 2.2 million unique news stories per year in multiple languages.
Change Healthcare – processes and anonymize more than 14 billion healthcare transactions and $1 trillion in claims annually.
Dun & Bradstreet, maintains a database of over 330 million global business records.
Foursquare’s location data is derived from 220 million unique consumers and includes more than 60 million global commercial venues.
For qualified data providers, AWS Data Exchange makes it easy to reach the millions of AWS customers migrating to the cloud. It removes the need to build and maintain infrastructure for data storage, delivery, billing, and entitling.
Enterprises, scientific researchers and academic institutions have been using third-party data for decades for different purposes. And over a period, they end up subscribing to more third-party data.
But often have to wait weeks to receive shipped physical media, manage sensitive credentials for multiple File Transfer Protocol (FTP) hosts and periodically check for updates, or code to several disparate application programming interfaces (APIs).
These methods are inconsistent with the modern architectures customers are developing in the cloud. This forces customers to build and maintain automation to ensure that they have the most up-to-date third-party data in the data lakes, applications, analytics, and machine-learning models that they’re migrating to AWS.
Finally, customers have to manage disparate billing relationships and licensing agreements with every data provider they use.
For data providers, it’s challenging to reach every customer that might be interested in their data without large investments in sales and marketing, as well as technology to store, deliver, bill for, and entitle data for their customers. These barriers often prevent customers who have valuable data from becoming a data provider.
But now AWS customers can subscribe to a diverse selection of third-party data in AWS Marketplace. For example, property insurers can subscribe to historical weather pattern data to calibrate insurance coverage requirements in different geographies; academic researchers can conduct studies on climate change by subscribing to data on carbon dioxide emissions and so forth.
Prior to subscribing to a data product, customers can review the price and terms of use that providers make publicly available. Once subscribed, customers can use the AWS Data Exchange API or console to ingest data they subscribe to directly into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to use across the broadest and deepest portfolio of cloud services in AWS.
Each time a provider publishes a new revision of their data, AWS Data Exchange notifies all subscribers via an Amazon CloudWatch Event, allowing them to automatically consume new revisions in their data lakes, applications, analytics, and machine-learning models running on AWS. Data subscription costs are consolidated in customers’ existing AWS invoice.
Additionally, customers can ask their data providers to deliver their existing subscriptions to them using AWS Data Exchange at no cost. This enables customers to use AWS Data Exchange to consume all their third-party data in the AWS cloud using a single API.
“Customers have asked us for an easier way to find, subscribe to, and integrate diverse data sets into the applications, analytics, and machine-learning models they’re running on AWS. Unfortunately, the way customers exchange data hasn’t evolved much in the last 20 years,” said Stephen Orban, GM – of AWS Data Exchange.
“AWS Data Exchange gives our customers the ability to quickly integrate third-party data in the workloads they’re migrating to the cloud, while giving qualified data providers a modern and secure way to package, deliver, and reach the millions of AWS customers worldwide,” added Orban.
AWS Data Exchange also makes it easy for qualified data providers to securely package, license, and deliver data products to millions of AWS customers worldwide.
AWS knows that customers care deeply about privacy and data security. AWS Data Exchange prohibits sharing sensitive personal data (e.g. personal health information) as well as any personal data that is not already lawfully and publicly available.
Qualified data providers can publish free or paid products under the terms of use they specify, and can issue private offers with custom terms for specific AWS customers. They can also choose to approve each subscription, allowing them to review intended uses cases or manage compliance needs.
AWS Data Exchange provides qualified data providers with daily, weekly, and monthly reports detailing subscription activity, and handles associated billing, payment collection, and secure delivery of data to subscribers.