AWS has announced the launch of a new service called AWS Data Exchange that allows customers of Amazon's cloud computing service to securely find, subscribe to and use third-party data in the cloud.
Over 1,000 products containing data are now available in the AWS Marketplace from more than 80 qualified data providers. In its press release announcing the new service, AWS highlighted a few of these qualified data providers and AWS customers will soon be able to access third-party data from Reuters, Change Healthcare, Dun & Bradstreet, TransUnion, Foursquare, Pitney Bowes and others.
AWS Data Exchange will make it easy for qualified data providers to reach millions of AWS customers migrating to the cloud by removing the need to build and maintain infrastructure for data storage, delivery, billing and entitling.
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The new service will save customers time when acquiring third-party data while also removing complexity as they will no longer have to wait to received shipped physical media or manage sensitive credentials for multiple FTP hosts.
AWS Data Exchange
AWS customers will now be able to subscribe to a diverse selection of third-party data in the AWS Marketplace.
Among the many use cases of AWS Data Exchange, the company provided a few examples including property insurers who can subscribe to historical weather pattern data to calibrate insurance coverage requirements, academic researchers working on climate change studies who can now subscribe to data on carbon emissions and healthcare professionals who can subscribe to aggregated data from historical clinical trials to help accelerate their research.
Before subscribing to a data product, customers will be able to review the price and terms of use that providers make publicly available. After subscribing, they can then use the AWS Data Exchange API or console to ingest data they subscribe to directly in Amazon S3.
Each time a data provider publishes a new revision of their data, AWS Data Exchange will notify all subscribers via an Amazon CloudWatch Event and this will allow customers to automatically consume new revisions in their data lakes, applications, analytics and machine learning models running on AWS.
General manager of AWS Data Exchange, Stephen Orban explained why AWS decided to launch its new service, saying:
“Customers have asked us for an easier way to find, subscribe to, and integrate diverse data sets into the applications, analytics, and machine-learning models they’re running on AWS. Unfortunately, the way customers exchange data hasn’t evolved much in the last 20 years. AWS Data Exchange gives our customers the ability to quickly integrate third-party data in the workloads they’re migrating to the cloud, while giving qualified data providers a modern and secure way to package, deliver, and reach the millions of AWS customers worldwide.”
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