AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Beyond Big Data: Why We’re Evolving the AWS Data and Analytics Competency
We are excited to announce significant updates to the AWS Big Data Competency Program to meet the needs of today’s market. First and foremost, we are renaming the program to the AWS Data and Analytics Competency. This change will help customers solve for the challenges of managing and analyzing data at scale.
Nearly 12 years have passed since the term “big data” first drew the spotlight, achieving high popularity with the advent of Apache Hadoop. Since then, data and analytics have become pervasive.
Big data is the new normal, but with its increasing volume, velocity, and variety the challenges for collecting, storing, managing, and analyzing data still remain. New questions are emerging, too, such as: What data do I have? How can I use it as a differentiating asset? How can I extract value from data while still complying with stringent regulations?
The collection and use of data are continuing to evolve, and so are our customers and AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners. Data has become one of the most valuable corporate assets and a clear source of differentiation, and we hope these changes make it easier and faster for you to build data products on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Check out the AWS Data and Analytics Partner Page >>
Categories in the AWS Data and Analytics Competency
The AWS Data and Analytics Competency has brand new categories as well, including:
- Data Analytic Platforms: APN Partners in this category provide a set of tightly integrated tools designed to work together to solve data analytic challenges within a standardized framework. Data analytic platforms should allow a diverse set of technologies to procure resources and applications on top of it. Components may include storage, processing, scheduling, security, and analytic facilities.
- NoSQL/New SQL: APN Partners in this category provide highly-scalable databases that organize data into a structure that is not a traditional RDBMS. NoSQL and New SQL databases typically scale horizontally (scale-out).
- Data Integration and Preparation: APN Partners in this category enable customers to move and consolidate data from disparate sources, transform it, and prepare it for analytics. This includes extract, transform, and load (ETL), as well as data quality, profiling, replication, preparation, and related technologies.
- Business Intelligence (BI) and Visualization: APN Partners in this category help customers turn raw data into actionable business information using online analytic processing technologies, such as reporting, dashboarding, and data visualization.
- Data Governance and Security: As a completely new category, this one deserves special mention below…
Introducing the New Data Governance and Security Category
We are also excited to launch a new Data Governance and Security category within the AWS Data and Analytics Competency.
AWS provides a comprehensive set of services and resources to discover, identify, catalog, monitor, and protect data. APN Partners in this category help customers discover, categorize, and control their data.
This includes defining and enforcing policies; security and management of personal information; creating data catalogs and glossaries; data lineage, data masking; and more. Partner solutions validated by the AWS Competency Program help customers achieve their data governance and compliance requirements to get maximum value from their data.
Data governance is not a new concept, but new regulations such as GDPR, as well as the size, complexity, and scope of today’s data, require a completely new approach. Big data technologies made it feasible to collect different types of data from myriad sources such as browsers, mobile applications, and connected devices, building huge repositories of data in the process. However, storing data is not enough.
In most cases, organizations don’t know what data they have, where it’s stored, or how sensitive and accurate it is. This prevents organizations from getting value from their data. It also creates significant risk—from data breaches and misuse of data to loss of corporate secrets and customer trust.
Organizations need to easily discover and understand all the data they manage. They need to automatically identify, categorize, and secure the data, including sensitive and personally identifiable information (PII). They need to make sure data is only accessed by the right people, and only for permitted uses. And they need to do it without hindering their ability to extract value from the data.
About the AWS Competency Program
By participating in the AWS Competency Program and undergoing technical and practice validation, APN Partners gain access to the technical expertise of AWS Solutions Architects and the extensive collection of best practices gathered by ISSI auditors over hundreds of AWS Competency and AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP) audits.
The key value of the AWS Competency Program is to build customer trust by helping organizations choose the top APN Partners based on workload, solution, or industry designation. The AWS Competency Program identifies, validates, and differentiates the top APN Partners that have demonstrated customer success and deep specialization in specific solution areas or segments.