What is Amazon Quicksight?

Introduction

Data and analytics play a significant role in the modern data-driven business landscape. A McKinsey report shows that nearly all employees will leverage data to augment their work by 2025. However, organisations don’t effectively ingest and process all useful information mainly because of the lack of data analytic infrastructure. Huge volumes of data come from different sources, and processing the data takes time, making it impossible to use all the information for better decision-making. Amazon Quicksight is a business intelligence service designed for cloud-based businesses to connect data from different sources for quick decision-making using a single dashboard.

In this blog, let’s explore What AWS Quicksight is and how it disrupts data visualization workflows.

What is Amazon Quicksight?

Amazon Quicksight is a cloud-based ML-powered serverless platform for business intelligence, part of Amazon Web Services (AWS). The dashboards allow users to create visualizations quickly, and the ML insights feature makes it easy to identify data anomalies.

AWS Quicksight can pull data from multiple sources, such as individual databases, data warehouses, and SaaS sources, unlike other BI tools. It supports numerous file formats, including semi-structured JSON format. It means you can gather structured and semi-structured data from any source to derive business intelligence.

Amazon Quicksight is available as a cloud service that users can use immediately without changing the existing infrastructure. If your enterprise already leverages AWS services, paying for Quicksight is all that is needed to scale up and visualise enterprise data in a secure and easy-to-read manner.

AWS Quicksight Pricing

The first thing companies focus on when introducing new technology is the Amazon Quicksight cost. This pricing model allows enterprises to pay only according to their usage, as it is priced according to user role.

• Author – Connect to data, create dashboards, generate reports, and share with other users (Author – $24 per user per month and Author Pro – $50 per user per month)
• Reader – Explore dashboards, download data, and get email reports (Reader – $3 per user month and Reader Pro – $20 per user per month)

When you want access to the platform but are unsure of the number of users, you can choose the capacity-based AWS Quicksight price – Reader Capacity starts from $250 for 500 sessions per month and Amazon Q Questions capacity also starts from $250 for 500 questions per month.

What is Amazon Quicksight Used for?

Big data gained prominence in enterprises after the introduction of business intelligence tools. To enable companies to move data, applications, and networks to the cloud, professionals who completed an AWS course were needed. Moving to the cloud and accessing business intelligence is the first step. The key to data-driven decision-making is the availability of quality data.

Often, businesses have large amounts of information that couldn’t be used for business intelligence, mainly because data in different formats cannot be processed quickly to facilitate data visualisation. Amazon Quicksight allows exploring huge volumes of data to create deeper insights. It leverages natural language processing to enable users to ask questions in plain English and get their visualisations as the output.

There is no need for BI teams to build data models on data sets to enable this capability. It is built-in with Amazon Quicksight and enables anyone to make sense of the data even if they don’t have any background or experience in data science. It can be used for the following use cases:

• Creating financial reports, tracking KPIs, and identifying trends
• Analysing sales data, tracking sales pipelines, and measuring sales effectiveness
• Measuring marketing campaign performance, customer segmentation, and market trends
• Monitoring key business metrics, identifying bottlenecks, and optimising processes

How to Visualise Data with Amazon Quicksight?

Once you learn to use the AWS tutorial, you will have the basic understanding needed to use the AWS services. Becoming a data scientist becomes more straightforward if you learn data visualisation using Amazon Quicksight. Here are the steps:

1.    Collect and Load Data

The first step to data visualization is collecting and pulling data from all relevant sources. Quicksight seamlessly integrates with Amazon utilities such as Aurora, Redshift, Athena, Elasticsearch Service (ES), and Simple Storage Service (S3). You can also pull data from on-premise databases, API-based data sources, file uploads, and IoT devices.

2.    Connect to Data

The next step is connecting to data, which Quicksight can do, irrespective of the location of the data. So, you can connect the BI platform to AWS cloud, third-party applications, SaaS platforms, corporate data centres, and other types of XLSX, CSV, or JSON files. During the data preparation phase, you can filter, rename the fields, change data types, and use SQL queries.

3.    Data Analysis

The true power of AWS Quicksight can be experienced as you launch the BI platform. It analyses the data using SPICE (Super-fast Parallel In-Memory Calculation Engine) to calculate insights and create graphs. The SPICE has built-in storage and processing, which removes the need for data retrieval whenever there is an analysis charge or visual change.

4.    Develop Data Visualisation

Users can completely customize visualization to see the insights they want anytime. There is no need for manual extract, transform, and load operations as Quicksight automates the ETL process. The interactive dashboards are visually convenient to use with embedded analytics. Business users can email reports and take necessary actions. Different visuals like charts, graphs, sheets, stories, tables, charts, and more can be created with a few clicks. If you cannot choose the right type of visual, Quicksight can help you suggest the best visual based on the data. Users can connect multiple iterations of data analysis to create a business story.

5.    Insights Sharing

After data analysis, you can create a dashboard for the analysis. It is a read-only snapshot that shows data reports on a web browser, android, or iOS app. Quicksight enables dashboard and dataset sharing with other users and groups. Sharing the insights with a large group is also possible by publishing a dashboard or sending a link to the subscribers.

Things to Know About Amazon Quicksight

There is no shortage of BI tools in the market. However, Amazon AWS Quicksight differentiates from the rest due to the following specialty features:

• The secure platform has a built-in dependency that supports the distribution of dashboards and insights to multiple users for working together.
• SPICE engine replicates data and shields underlying infrastructure automatically to allow fast and interactive analysis creation.
• Using ML and natural language, users can discover hidden trends, business drivers, outliers, what-if forecasting, and more, even if they don’t have ML experience.
• Developers can use Amazon SageMaker and Quicksight to create predictive dashboards without writing a single line of code.

Benefits of Amazon Quicksight

Amazon Quicksight proves to be a valuable tool for enterprises that wish to make decisions based on data. If you prefer working with AWS tools, explore some of the common AWS interview questions to get recruited by top organisations. The AWS suite of tools keeps expanding, but those who learn the AWS basics can easily update their skills because these modern tools have intuitive user interfaces. Some of the benefits of the latest addition, Quicksight, are:

• Easy set-up: The Quicksight BI platform does not require infrastructure changes, so you can roll out ML BI dashboards immediately at scale.
• Leverage all data sources: There is no need to ignore any data, as Quicksight supports numerous data sources.
• Fast performance: The SPICE engine optimizes data visualization with automatic data replication, saving time, money, and resources.
• Cost-effective: You can choose pay-per-session pricing to allow as many readers to review the dashboards as possible without incurring licensing costs.
• Hassle-free sharing: With single Sign-on (SSO) and integrated APIs, sharing insights has never been easier. You can directly embed dashboards into enterprise applications without writing any code.
• Standards compliance: Quicksight is naturally compliant with industry standards such as HIPAA, Security operations centres, and FedRAMP, allowing users to integrate without hassle.
• Customizable dashboards: With Quicksight Mobile, Users can personalize their experience from anywhere at any time, regardless of the data source.

Conclusion

Amazon Quicksight is a powerful and versatile BI tool for analyzing and visualizing data quickly. Its scalability, serverless architecture, and machine learning integration make it ideal for businesses of all sizes. Further, the cloud-based service and cost-effective pricing allow business leaders to get insights anytime from anywhere, even without complex ML knowledge or experience.

FAQs

What is AWS QuickSight?

AWS Quicksight is a cloud-based, serverless, ML-powered business intelligence platform that allows users to create and personalise interactive dashboards and share them with others.

Is AWS QuickSight a visualisation tool?

AWS Quicksight is a highly customizable data visualization tool that allows you to create interactive dashboards without writing any code.

Is Amazon QuickSight a SaaS or PaaS?

Amazon Quicksight is available as a SaaS product as it is fully managed.

What is Amazon QuickSight report?

The Quicksight report presents data visualizations and insights to enterprise users. It can contain charts, graphs, pie charts, and other visualization types that facilitate collaborative analysis.