We are in an era where data drives business and is also growing exponentially. The organizations that can empower their business with easy-to-use, fast, and real-time data will have the competitive edge over their peers. Amazon QuickSight is the next generation Business Intelligence (BI) application that can help you build interactive visualizations on top of various data sources hosted on Amazon Cloud Infrastructure. QuickSight delivers fast and responsive insights on big data and enables organizations to quickly democratize data visualizations and scale to hundreds of users at a fraction of the cost when compared to traditional BI tools.
In this introduction chapter, we will get an overview of Amazon QuickSight and its differences compared to traditional BI tools. We will cover the following topics:
We live in a digital era where data is generated everywhere, from smart connected devices to social media. In 2014, every second over 5,700 tweets were sent and 800 links were shared using Facebook, and the digital universe expanded by about 1.7 MB per minute for every person on earth (source: IDC 2014 report). This amount of data sharing and storing is unprecedented and is contributing to what is known as big data. In 2013, about 4.4 ZB were created and in 2020 the forecast is 44 ZB, which is 44 trillion GB (source: http://www.emc.com/leadership/digital-universe/2014iview/executive-summary.htm).
Figure 1.1: Data growth
IDC predicts that organizations that are able to analyze this big data and derive actionable insights will see an additional $430 billion in productivity benefits over their peers (source: IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Big Data and Analytics 2016 Predictions, https://www.cloudera.com/content/dam/www/static/documents/analyst-reports/idc-futurescape.pdf).
Let's look at some real use cases that have benefited from big data:
This unprecedented growth of data has resulted in need for faster insights, quicker co-relations, and the need to democratize data and analysis. Let's next look at the current BI landscape, key features they provide, and also their limitations.