Strategies to Reduce Costs with AWS | West Loop Strategy

Reduce Analytics / BI Costs while Improving Acceptability

Problem

Our Client, an education technology company, sought to harness the potential of data for sparking innovation and guiding business decisions throughout the company. However, their existing system was disjointed and costly, with various tools generating inconsistent findings and prolonging the time required for valuable insights. The company's traditional BI solution and data were scattered across numerous tools, some utilizing exclusive logic, leading to struggles with data quality concerning consistency, ownership, and inadequate data access for their target users, owing to a complicated BI access procedure, licensing issues, and insufficient education.

Our client's objective was to consolidate all the data within a single, cohesive interface via a data lake, democratize this information through a BI solution to empower autonomous teams across the organization to efficiently utilize the data, and stimulate innovation through advanced data insights, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

Solution

The firm had already incorporated AWS into various facets of its operations and discovered that QuickSight not only satisfied all its BI and reporting requirements through flawless integration with the AWS suite but also offered several distinct advantages compared to established solutions and other tools assessed. Utilizing QuickSight for the deployment of interactive dashboards and reporting for clients, as well as enabling our customer success teams to develop or modify dashboard prototypes on our internally-facing QuickSight instance before promoting them to customers via the product, presented a highly persuasive use case.

Our client developed new client-oriented embedded dashboards within their internal portal and transitioned their legacy dashboards to Amazon QuickSight, a comprehensive BI service delivering contemporary interactive dashboards, natural language inquiries, paginated reports, machine learning(ML) insights, and large-scale embedded analytics.

Outcome

Utilizing QuickSight's serverless, session-based pricing structure, our client is poised to experience significant cost reductions. This pay-per-use model allows the company to effortlessly grant access to all its users and clients, bypassing the need for costly per-reader licenses. Moreover, users are not required to cover server instance expenses or manage BI infrastructure. As a result, they can phase out custom reporting, infrastructure, and multiple tools in favor of the new data architecture offered by QuickSight. The previously essential custom reporting infrastructure will no longer require maintenance. Our client anticipates a threefold increase in their projected return on investment for the forthcoming year.

To make self-service even easier, our client will soon launch embedded Amazon QuickSight Q so anyone can ask questions in natural language and receive accurate answers with relevant visualizations that help them gain insights from the data. By helping business users and experts rapidly prototype dashboards and reports in line with user and customer needs Migrating to QuickSight enabled the firm to streamline data and insights access across teams and customers and reduced overall turnaround time to build and deliver insights from months to weeks.

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