Data Warehousing on AWS: What's New With Amazon Redshift?

Matthew George | Monday, April 27, 2020

Data Warehousing on AWS: What's New With Amazon Redshift?

Although many people associate Amazon with the speedy delivery of all sorts of physical products, a large portion of Amazon’s revenue is made from its web services: AWS. More than one million people use these services, and many international and government agencies have moved to AWS, especially thanks to Amazon Redshift. 

Redshift is the latest in data warehousing from Amazon, and offers the highest security available from any major company, with the performance to match. 

Here's everything you need to know. 

Getting to Know Amazon Redshift

If you're looking for fully managed data warehousing at the scale of petabytes, your pleas have been answered.

Amazon Redshift offers large-scale data storage for companies that need to share, model and analyze massive amounts of information. This tool is also ideal for performing database migrations of corporations and enterprises. No longer must data be partitioned and sent off to a variety of locations. Instead, all your data can be kept intact as you migrate from one system to another.

For its technical merits, Redshift is designed to connect to any SQL-based tools and clients so that the data on them is available to users instantaneously. Real-time access means fast performance and much quicker querying, which helps keep teams connected in ways that influence business analyses and decision making. 

Warehouses keep all your computing resources together in a cluster. Redshift engines are owned by each Redshift cluster, each with its very own database. 

Redshift Boosts Performance

One benefit Redshift is already renowned for is its speed and transfer rates.

Gaining fast query speeds on massive sets of data means you can zoom through petabytes in an instant. With traditional systems, on the other hand, you may have to wait minutes or even hours on complex searches for data. 

Traditional data warehousing is no match for the performance that Redshift offers to applications using lots of data. When you have high-demand applications that require fast data access and running massive amounts of queries, you need Redshift's performance.

Another major advantage of using Redshift is in its changes to the architecture, as it uses Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) alongside columnar data storage. 

Major Budget Savings 

Affordable high-level performance is the holy grail for IT executives. And from start to finish, executives typically expect to spend a lot upfront for the layout of hardware. 

Given the speed and performance enhancements Redshift offers, you may think the cost would be out of reach for most companies. However, this speed doesn't cost what it might when promised by traditional warehousing.

With a few upfront costs to set up Redshift, the bonus is that there are no recurrent hardware or maintenance costs. If you're a database administrator, you can set up your data warehouse without dealing with procurement and strategic buy-in. And even better, you'll only be paying for what you're using. There's no need to worry about complicated contracts that keep you locked into long-term signups, whereas with some services, maintenance contracts can extend for years beyond the time you signed up for the service.

When you can offer the equivalent in capabilities, quality and performance of multi-million–dollar solutions for a fraction of the expected cost, you'll walk out of your next executive meeting looking like a hero.

Scaling Beyond Compare

Scalability is vital for organizations in the middle of digital transformation, global expansion and/or M&A growth. Similarly, companies may be in the process of scaling down from a global to a local focus or phasing out the hosting of customer information, so their needs will drop. Traditional data warehousing can be a huge challenge when data needs change. 

Whatever your business goals and needs are for the future, Redshift has them covered. One of the major advantages of Redshift is that there's no need to invest in new hardware — even for companies with more complicated business models or processes.

Redshift offers newfound flexibility and scale. As requirements shift, capacity and performance needs can be met without even calling up an agent, as the management console allows for any major changes you might need.

Redshift Offers Security

On top of capacity and performance, security is also a top concern for Amazon, as it is the tipping point for many enterprises. Security vulnerabilities are a concern for any company that stores its data with a third-party provider. Hosting your data off site has many advantages, but it may leave some people feeling uneasy about their data. 

Amazon lives by the "shared responsibility" model. They take responsibility for the security of the cloud itself, and they expect their clients to take responsibility for the security of the data while it's inside the cloud. 

Redshift offers the highest levels of security. Through identity and access management, credentials and access are kept secure. Organizations using a private cloud can use their virtual private cloud environment. With automatic data encryption, all data will be secure as it arrives at the cloud and when it leaves. 

Amazon Redshift Helps Brands Grow

Amazon Redshift allows companies to collaborate, share and grow without having to split their data between centers. It also enables them to give their clients the best in performance for streaming videos, storing data or sharing files. 

Learn more about big data, data warehouses and planning and designing databases — all on AWS.