Unlock the Full Potential of Amazon Redshift and Amazon Athena with Orbit’s Reporting Solution

Amazon offers an array of data storage and analytics solutions such as Amazon Redshift and Amazon Athena that are becoming increasingly popular as businesses embrace digital transformation and migrate to the cloud. A fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service, AWS Redshift allows businesses to collect, store and analyze data for making informed decisions. AWS Athena is a serverless interactive query service enabling data analysis in Amazon S3 using standard SQL.

Built for the cloud, Amazon Redshift is fast and provides users with many benefits. For instance, Redshift’s Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) architecture enables quick loading of data and enables distributing and parallelizing of queries across multiple nodes. Its query engine that is based on ParAccel is similar to PostgreSQL, works with existing Postgres JDBC/ODBC drivers, and readily connects to a range of Business Intelligence (BI) tools, including Orbit Reporting & Analytics. 

With Amazon Athena, because it is serverless, it is easy to set and query data in its native format, wherever it is stored. Being based on the Presto SQL query engine, you can use it to query data in many formats such as JSON, CSV, log files, among others.

Limitations of Amazon’s own Reporting and Analytics Tools

Amazon provides a variety of reporting and analytics tools, and there are several third-party tools available in the market too. However, in our experience, businesses are looking for a single tool to manage multiple requirements. Most of the tools available are unable to meet this need, because of which customers end up buying several tools and customize on top of that. 

This leads to inflated costs due to investing in multiple solutions as well as makes them cumbersome and difficult to maintain. The purpose of moving to the cloud is to break down organizational silos and provide a single source of truth. But when each function creates its own customized plug-ins, the purpose gets defeated and multiple versions of data start floating around. This reduces the effectiveness of using data to make decisions and makes it difficult to collaborate. 

Seeking An Alternative: Why Orbit Offers an Ideal Self-Service Reporting Solutions for Amazon Redshift and Amazon Athena  

A large satellite network company moved a part of its data to the cloud using Amazon Redshift and Athena. This was in addition to having Oracle ERP and Teradata for their organizational data storage and retrieval needs. They even had some third-party reporting and analytics tools, which they were using for specific BI needs. 

In Spite of all this, it was a challenge to bring together data from disparate sources. 

After evaluating many third-party tools, the company opted for Orbit’s Reporting and Analytics tool to unlock the full potential of cloud data stored on Amazon Redshift and Athena. 

Orbit Reporting and Analytics — for Insights and Decision Support

An orbit is a popular tool used for operational reporting, business intelligence, financial reporting, and more. Some of the features that enable business users to unleash the full benefits of moving to Amazon Redshift and Athena include:

1. Accessing Data from Multiple Sources: The Orbit reporting and analytics tool is platform-agnostic, empowering businesses with access to data across their organization, both on-prem and the cloud. This is one of the most critical features as even in times of digital transformation, businesses tend to have their organizational data distributed in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. A tool that can pull data from all these sources and create a unified view is essential for making informed decisions. 
2.  Self-Service: The second feature that makes it very useful for Redshift and Athena users is its empowering business users with self-service to generate real-time transactional reports. Many tools need the IT team to pull data and create reports. This is a bottleneck and by the time the users can access it, the data can become dated and useless. Users can also schedule the running of reports in a predefined frequency such as daily, weekly, or monthly.
3. Easy to track Key Metrics and KPIs: The Orbit tool enables tracking business metrics and KPIs in real-time, with mobile-ready dashboards. This is especially useful for quick review even when on the move. 
4. Visualization and Dashboards: Visualization tools for building reports and dashboards quickly and as per user needs are also available. It facilitates collaboration with other team members by sharing reports for faster decisions.
5. Drill-Down Capabilities: The tool allows drilling down from the summary to the lowest level of detail in any report, critical in financial reporting. 
6. Excel Integration: Plugins like Excel Edge for Excel Reporting and GLSense for Financial Reporting allow users to use Excel for real-time reporting and analytics. Excel is a very popular tool but does not access data in real-time. Orbit enables this by integrating with Excel and allowing refresh for users to view the latest data in real-time anytime.
7. Secure Access: Orbit provides secured access to data based on authentication and authorization. With role-based access, users can see only the data they are allowed to, thus ensuring compliance and privacy.

With Orbit, Redshift and Athena reporting users can do operational, financial, ad hoc, and strategic reporting and analytics with ease. 

To know more, visit: https://www.orbitanalytics.com/