Amazon Web Services Announces AWS Data Exchange

New service makes it easy for Amazon Web Services customers to find, subscribe to, and use third-party data in the cloud

Amazon Web Services, an Amazon.com company, announced AWS Data Exchange, a new service that makes it easy for millions of AWS customers to securely find, subscribe to, and use third-party data in the cloud. Qualified data providers include category-leading brands such as Reuters, who curate data from over 2.2 million unique news stories per year in multiple languages; Change Healthcare, who process and anonymize more than 14 billion healthcare transactions and $1 trillion in claims annually; Dun & Bradstreet, who maintain a database of more than 330 million global business records; and Foursquare, whose location data is derived from 220 million unique consumers and includes more than 60 million global commercial venues. For qualified data providers, AWS Data Exchange makes it easy to reach the millions of AWS customers migrating to the cloud by removing the need to build and maintain infrastructure for data storage, delivery, b******, and entitling.

Enterprises, scientific researchers, and academic institutions have been using third-party data for decades to conduct research, power applications and analytics, train machine-learning models, and make data-driven decisions. But, as these customers subscribe to more third-party data, they often have to wait weeks to receive shipped physical media, manage sensitive credentials for multiple File Transfer Protocol (FTP) hosts and periodically check for updates, or code to several disparate application programming interfaces (APIs). These methods are inconsistent with the modern architectures customers are developing in the cloud. This forces customers to build and maintain automation to ensure that they have the most up-to-date third-party data in the data lakes, applications, analytics, and machine-learning models that they’re migrating to AWS. Finally, customers have to manage disparate b****** relationships and licensing agreements with every data provider they use. For data providers, it’s challenging to reach every customer that might be interested in their data without large investments in sales and marketing, as well as technology to store, deliver, bill for, and entitle data for their customers. These barriers often prevent customers who have valuable data from becoming a data provider.

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Starting today, AWS customers can subscribe to a diverse selection of third-party data in AWS Marketplace. For example, property insurers can subscribe to historical weather pattern data to calibrate insurance coverage requirements in different geographies; academic researchers can conduct studies on climate change by subscribing to data on carbon dioxide emissions; and healthcare professionals can subscribe to aggregated data from historical clinical trials to accelerate their research activities. Prior to subscribing to a data product, customers can review the price and terms of use that providers make publicly available. Once subscribed, customers can use the AWS Data Exchange API or console to ingest data they subscribe to directly into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to use across the broadest and deepest portfolio of cloud services in AWS. Each time a provider publishes a new revision of their data, AWS Data Exchange notifies all subscribers via an Amazon CloudWatch Event, allowing them to automatically consume new revisions in their data lakes, applications, analytics, and machine-learning models running on AWS. Data subscription costs are consolidated in customers’ existing AWS invoice. Additionally, customers can ask their data providers to deliver their existing subscriptions to them using AWS Data Exchange at no cost. This enables customers to use AWS Data Exchange to consume all their third-party data in the AWS cloud using a single API.

“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,” said Stephen Orban, General Manager of AWS Data Exchange. “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.”

AWS Data Exchange also makes it easy for qualified data providers to securely package, license, and deliver data products to millions of AWS customers worldwide. AWS knows that customers care deeply about privacy and data security. AWS Data Exchange prohibits sharing sensitive personal data (e.g. personal health information) as well as any personal data that is not already lawfully and publicly available. Qualified data providers can publish free or paid products under the terms of use they specify, and can issue private offers with custom terms for specific AWS customers. They can also choose to approve each subscription, allowing them to review intended uses cases or manage compliance needs. AWS Data Exchange provides qualified data providers with daily, weekly, and monthly reports detailing subscription activity, and handles associated b******, payment collection, and secure delivery of data to subscribers.

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Reuters curates and distributes over 2.2 million unique news stories per year in multiple languages. “Reuters is constantly seeking new ways to broaden the reach of our independent, trusted and unbiased news content and data. We are excited to be among the first providers of such content on AWS Data Exchange, where our multi-language news data will be made available to a diverse range of AWS customers around the globe,” said Alphonse Hardel, Global Head of Business Development and Strategy, Reuters. “With the increasing demand across industries to use news content to train and power their mission critical AI and analytics applications on the cloud, the depth and accuracy of Reuters coverage means AWS customers are now able to seamlessly access the highest quality of data from AWS Data Exchange,” added Hardel.

Dun & Bradstreet’s database of more than 330 million global business records helps retail, manufacturing, financial services, and technology customers improve their credit, risk, marketing, and sales operations. “Our customers have been using Dun & Bradstreet’s commercial data solutions to deliver insights that empower their ability to accelerate revenue, lower cost, mitigate risk, and transform their businesses. We are excited to now offer this data to our existing and prospective joint AWS customers in a cloud native way on AWS Data Exchange,” said Ken Lordy, Director of Products at Dun & Bradstreet. “Using AWS Data Exchange to distribute our content allows our customers another integrated option to access our attributes to inform decisioning across business intelligence, product strategy, marketing, and more.”

Databricks helps organizations make their data ready for analytics and enable data-driven decisions across their organization. “By integrating the AWS Data Exchange API into Databricks, our customers can seamlessly combine third-party data with their existing data lakes to perform advanced data science and analytics at scale on AWS,” said Pankaj Dugar, VP, Technology and Data Provider Partnerships.

Change Healthcare is a mission-critical partner to the healthcare industry, processing 14 billion healthcare transactions and $1 trillion in claims annually. “As a pioneer in healthcare, we are excited to enable new opportunities for customers migrating to AWS to leverage AWS Data Exchange to find, subscribe to, and use responsibly aggregated and de-identified healthcare claims and transaction data to improve our collective well-being,” said Tim Suther, SVP of Data Solutions for Change Healthcare. “AWS Data Exchange is an effective and secure way to share our data with existing subscribers, and accelerates our ability to deliver to customers working to solve healthcare’s most challenging issues. We’re also excited by the opportunity to become a subscriber and gain access to some of the other unique offerings in the AWS Data Exchange catalog to help us enrich our own data and deliver more value to our customers.”

Deloitte’s ConvergeHEALTH Miner platform empowers life sciences and healthcare organizations to drive transformation toward value-based, personalized medicine by applying integrated cloud-based analytics, knowledge management, and collaboration tools. “By integrating the AWS Data Exchange API into ConvergeHEALTH Miner, we’re giving our customers a quick and easy way to find, subscribe to, and use data from third parties alongside the data they’re already generating and analyzing in the cloud,” said Brett Davis, Principal at Deloitte Consulting and General Manager of ConvergeHEALTH. “AWS Data Exchange is unlocking a number of data sources that have traditionally been locked in siloes spanning multiple organizations, and gives healthcare stakeholders a scalable and secure service to create new collaborative business models to reimagine how they approach research, clinical trials, pharmacovigilance, population health, and reimbursement.”

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Foursquare is the most trusted, independent location data platform for understanding how people move through the real world. “Being a provider for AWS Data Exchange enables companies to directly access Foursquare’s audiences and places datasets—which is derived from our understanding of 220 million unique consumers, 100 million devices, and 60 million global commercial venues—in order to strengthen customer intelligence, build context-rich applications, and assess category & chain trends,” says Josh Cohen, SVP Product at Foursquare. “AWS Data Exchange provides us with secure access to customers at incomparable scale, while also serving as an easy data ingestion and activation vehicle for data usage.”

TruFactor’s anonymization platform and proprietary AI ingests, filters, and transforms more than 85 billion high-quality raw signals daily from wireless carriers, OEMs, and mobile apps into a unified, accurate view of the consumer across physical and digital dimensions. “Our patented TruFactor platform produces anonymized intelligence that enterprises can license with the confidence that they are meeting the highest standards of security, privacy, and compliance,” said Piyush Shah, CEO of TruFactor. “We are pleased to offer this intelligence for the first time on AWS Data Exchange, which enables our customers around the globe to easily access and power analytics like investment research, optimization of retail sites, and transportation demand models.”

Pitney Bowes is an address-centric data provider and global technology company focused on responsibly curating data to inform and solve customer problems. “We’re excited to make our World Points of Interest, Demographics, and World Streets data available on AWS Data Exchange so that millions of AWS customers can drive business outcomes that matter,” says Bob Guidotti, EVP and President of Pitney Bowes Software & Data. “AWS has always been known for their world-class suite of analytics, and we’re proud to be a part of that.”

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