In today’s data-driven world, the efficiency of key business decisions hinges on the quality of available data. The ability to interpret and derive meaningful insights from data is crucial. Business Intelligence (BI) tools play a vital role in enhancing data quality by adding a presentation layer, transforming raw data into actionable information that drives effective decision-making.
The BI tools market is highly competitive, featuring numerous players such as Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, QlikView, SAS, IBM Cognos, and Google Data Studio, each offering unique functionalities and features.
In this blog, we’ll delve into the distinctive features of AWS’s relatively new BI tool, QuickSight, and explore why it is gaining traction amidst a crowded field of BI solutions.
Amazon QuickSight
Amazon QuickSight empowers data-driven organizations by providing unified business intelligence (BI) at hyperscale. With QuickSight, all users can address diverse analytical needs from a single source of truth through modern interactive dashboards, paginated reports, natural language queries, and embedded analytics.
Key Features of Amazon QuickSight
Cost-Effective and Fast: Amazon QuickSight powers millions of dashboard views efficiently, providing a high-performance, interactive experience at a lower cost.
Interactive Data Discovery: Users can uncover hidden data and mine insights within an engaging visual environment, making analysis more intuitive and insightful.
Accurate Forecasting and What-If Analysis: QuickSight offers precise forecasting capabilities and robust what-if analysis to support strategic decision-making.
Effortless Visualizations: Empowering users with advanced visualizations without the need for time-consuming data preparation, freeing authors and admins to focus on more critical tasks.
Seamless Embedding: Easily embed interactive visualizations and dashboards into applications and websites, enhancing accessibility and user engagement.
Natural Language Query: Utilize natural language query capabilities within dashboards and applications, making it easier for users to gain insights without extensive technical knowledge.
Universal Access: Access QuickSight from any device—laptop, desktop, smartphone, or tablet. Even when offline, the offline mode ensures uninterrupted data analysis and visualization.
Maximizing the Value of Amazon QuickSight
Succeeding with Amazon QuickSight is easier with a trusted partner.
Request a Free Consultation
Ease of use
Amazon QuickSight empowers data-driven organizations by providing unified business intelligence (BI) at hyperscale. With QuickSight, all users can address diverse analytical needs from a single source of truth through modern interactive dashboards, paginated reports, natural language queries, and embedded analytics.
The data preparation console is user friendly and the data can be quickly customized by adding calculated fields to data sets which makes the dashboards interactive. The ability to adjust the reports as per the domains and requirements is remarkable. The filters and actions in QuickSight instantly help in gathering insights in no time.
Data source accessibility
QuickSight integrates seamlessly with a spectrum of data sources like relational databases, S3, Apache Spark etc.
QuickSight can connect to a variety of Software as a Service (SaaS) data sources either by connecting directly or by using Open Authorization (OAuth)
Data in file formats like CSV/TSV, ELF/CLF, XLSX from local sources can be visualized by either uploading directly to SPICE (super-fast, parallel, in-memory calculation engine of QuickSight) or uploading the file to S3 and crawling the data to extract schema so that it can be queried by AWS Athena and visualized in QuickSight.
Slick and smooth SPICE Engine
The super-fast, parallel, in-memory calculation engine (SPICE) which is built from the ground up for the cloud, enhances the speed and support users to query large amounts of data, process and analyse them at a lightning pace, simultaneously. By simply logging-in users can connect to the data and create dashboards with ease.
Sharing the dashboards via email becomes simpler with the options for scheduling and customizing the email details with email text and report preference.
Smart suggestions for Visualizations
Based on the underlying properties of different columnar data, QuickSight has an in-built suggestion engine that drills into datatype, which recommends the most appropriate graph using AutoGraph. The best visual that matches the analytical patterns in the dataset using a collection of algorithms is shown by default.
Embed dashboards and APIs
It is easy to build embedded dashboards with QuickSight, which empowers the users with analytics to gain insights from within their custom applications. The interactive dashboards and visuals are flexibly designed to enhance the look and feel of the application.
Email notifications can be enabled about the status of the loading data and data refresh can be scheduled rather than refreshing it manually.
Mobile Applications
The application securely enables to get insights from the data from any browser and share the interactive dashboards with other users. The visuals in the dashboards are in sync with application perfectly which makes it more convenient to access.
Mobile Application – Source: Amazon quicksight blog
ML- Insights
To gain additional insights from the data ML- insights feature enables the user to identify the hidden patterns, discover outliers, perform accurate forecasting and what-if analysis with AWS’s proven machine learning & natural language capabilities.
Scalability
Organizations can scale their capabilities for users and delivers extremely fast, responsive query performance. More users can simultaneously work on the QuickSight with access to all sources of data at the same time.
Service & Support
The support provided by AWS support in fixing up the queries that we raise is remarkable. The issues are being sorted out directly via email and phone to understand the customers effectively.
Pricing
The unique feature that QuickSight hold is pay-per-session model users who consume dashboards others have created. Readers are charged at $0.30 for a 30-minute session up to a maximum charge of $5/reader/month for unlimited use, instead of paying periodically despite the usage.
Common business scenarios where Amazon QuickSight kicks in,
In an organization level, to exhibit the activity status of the job to the management, client and show the progress over a period.
Effectively showcasing the market position & revenue generated from various projects, thereby can help companies realise the potential opportunities.
Sharing monthly reports from different departments in an organization made easy using ad-hoc QuickSight dashboards.
By building user-friendly dashboards, clients can forecast the data fields based on their requirements for leveraging their products or usage of services.
Challenges faced in Amazon QuickSight
Complexity in Customization: Users often find it challenging to customize dashboards and reports to meet specific needs without extensive technical expertise.
Limited Data Source Integrations: While QuickSight supports numerous data sources, some users require integrations with less common or proprietary data systems that QuickSight may not natively support.
Performance Issues with Large Datasets: Handling very large datasets can sometimes lead to performance bottlenecks, affecting the speed and responsiveness of reports and dashboards.
Advanced Analytics Limitations: Some advanced analytics features, such as complex data modeling and machine learning integrations, are less robust compared to specialized tools.
User Management and Permissions: Managing user roles and permissions can be cumbersome, particularly in large organizations with diverse user needs and security requirements.
Offline Mode Limitations: Although QuickSight offers offline mode, the functionality can be limited, affecting users who frequently need to access data and insights without internet connectivity.
Learning Curve: New users may face a steep learning curve, especially those unfamiliar with BI tools or AWS ecosystem, necessitating additional training and support.
Addressing these challenges is crucial for organizations to fully leverage the potential of Amazon QuickSight and achieve their business intelligence goals effectively.
Get to Business-Critical Information Quickly and Easily with AWS QuickSight
Our AWS QuickSight services are helping customers across various industries—from retail to finance—design, develop, and implement sophisticated reporting dashboards, delivering tangible value.
Key benefits include:
85% Reduction in Response Time: Experience faster report generation and an enhanced user experience.
Up to 90% Improvement in Report and Query Performance: Significantly reduce the time taken to run reports and queries.
75% Reduction in Data Access Time: Access data much faster compared to traditional on-premises setups.
Up to 50% Lower Total Cost of Operations (TCO): Benefit from the AWS Cloud pay-per-use model, which offers significant cost savings compared to shared, on-premises instances.
With AWS QuickSight, accessing business-critical information has never been quicker or easier.
Our latest blogs here
Junior Data Analyst
1CloudHub
