Northius Centralizes and Standardizes Company-Wide Data in Modernization Effort Using AWS Lake Formation

Headquartered in Spain with operations throughout Europe and Latin America, Northius offers more than 500 courses in vocational education and general professional training (VET). Its VET offerings are intended to help Northius’s 65,000 students find employment. The company formed in May 2022 as an umbrella group for 13 VET brands with more than 12,000 corporate partnerships. Several months before the Northius group creation, one of the brands, Campus Training, had contacted AWS to modernize its architecture while fortifying security and privacy to protect the sensitive information of its users as required by the GDPR. As the newly formed parent group for Campus Training and others, Northius needed a way to centralize and standardize data from all the companies’ customer relationship management, financial transactions, and sales leads from landing pages on its websites. Its legacy on-premises data storage couldn’t scale fast enough to accommodate Northius’s growth as it acquired new companies and was growing at a double-digit annual rate.

The company aimed to revamp its data strategy in 3–4 months. It contacted AWS Professional Services, a global team of experts that can help organizations realize their desired business outcomes when using the AWS Cloud. Northius wanted a solution that provided greater agility so that the company could make quicker data-based business decisions. “AWS Professional Services helped us to understand that this is not about the technology. This is about how technology helps the business,” says Pablo Mosquera Sáenz, chief technology officer at Northius. The solution had to deliver quality data to internal teams while meeting GDPR requirements for privacy and security of students’ personally identifiable information, such as addresses and telephone numbers.

Northius worked alongside AWS Professional Services to build a data lake in the cloud using AWS Lake Formation, which helps companies to quickly build, manage, and secure data lakes. Northius uses its data lake as a centralized repository to securely store its structured and unstructured data from all of the software in use company-wide. Customized dashboards present near-real-time visualizations of data, helping Northius to gather insights that feed consistent company decision-making, rather than using different datasets as the basis for financial, commercial, and other business reports. “We had been making decisions in isolation, using data that was inconsistent and depended on the business area,” Sáenz says. “Now we are achieving data democracy. Data is transparent, available, and consistent.” Since its migration to AWS began, Northius has seen a 35 percent improvement in data consistency, a KPI it started to track when it began working alongside AWS.  

Using its data lake on AWS, the company delivers data-based internal decision-making tools up to three times faster than it did with its legacy solutions. “We need to access only one source of data, which increases the speed of delivery of our solutions,” Sáenz says. Data-driven KPIs indicate how a project will impact the business, helping Northius to prioritize projects. “This is a cultural change about how we make decisions with data,” says Sáenz. “We have a lot of projects in our portfolio. We use data to measure the impact of each project, and we can know if the project is going to be a success. Or, if we need to throw it away, we can fail fast.”

Northius has enhanced its data governance by standardizing internal policies regarding how data is gathered, stored, and processed. The company has greater visibility into who is accessing the personal information of users. It also has experienced a decrease in the time needed to resolve IT-related issues. For example, the company can clearly compare financial data with commercial data to detect if the system is properly integrating every sale. “We can check all the data related to a problem in just one place,” says Sáenz. “That’s a big, big benefit for us.”