Latest News and Updates from AWS

Love AWS? We do too! It’s been a while since we’ve done a news update on everything exciting happening over at AWS, so we thought it was about time to check back in again. With new features and products being released at a daily pace, it can be tricky to sift out exactly which AWS news items will be relevant to your business. That’s why we’ve done the heavy lifting. Take a look at our latest wrap of the most exciting updates from AWS that might just apply to your business.

Analysing text

By now, you will have gathered that some of the world’s biggest companies are extremely good at gleaning insights from text and using it to further their own customer insights. For example, the ads that Google serves you are closely related to your search history. Want to gain insights from the text that your company receives? You can do that too, with a new feature combining Amazon’s Elasticsearch and Amazon Comprehend.

The solution takes unstructured data in the form of text (their use cases are customer support logs and feedback) and derives insights from the data. Rather than having all that data sit there un-analysed (or having people pour over all the text themselves), you can get these services to do the heavy lifting for you with the help of Natural Language Processing (NLP). It can discover key and repeated phrases, language sentiment and more. Take a look.

Data forecasting

One computer-enabled function that all organisations need in their toolkit is data forecasting. This might be for absolutely any time-series data that your business gathers over time, such as sales figures, employee hiring and attrition, amount of web traffic your site receives – anything!

One of Amazon’s newer products is Amazon Forecast – the very service they use at Amazon to do data forecasting themselves. With the product, you simply provide the time-stamped data you’d like to use, as well as any related metadata that might affect the data itself, for example, if the economy was in a downturn for half a year, you’d include that information for your sales figures.

Forecasting can help significantly with planning ahead – for good times or bad times, supply and demand, and plenty of other areas, so run why not run some historical datasets through Amazon Forecast? You can see whether its predictions for the current day were correct – and then in applicable cases use it to plan for the near future. Replace those spreadsheets with a better solution!

IoT management gets easier

If you’ve started implementing smart devices in your workplace, but are wondering about how to better manage them, then AWS has a solution for that. It combines a bunch of different AWS services, linked to the AWS IoT core, to help manage devices, define event rules, ensure device security, gather data, and then analyse that data for insights, feeding back insights to relevant people (or apps) when necessary.

In short, it’s an end-to-end framework that will help do everything with your contingent of IoT devices that they’re capable of doing – in a controlled manner. It can even combine data from different devices to help you gain greater insights into what’s happening in your business.

Is it the easiest solution to implement yourself? No, not unless you’re not skilled in rolling out these types of services, but we can help build it for you and show you how to manage and update the full solution yourself.

Fraudulent transaction checking

Have an outdated or expensive fraud checking mechanism for credit and debit card transactions? Perhaps you’ve shied away from adding online transaction processing because you’ve heard that fraud runs rife in these situations, and getting money back can be a slow process.

Well, AWS has a solution for that, too. It’s a machine learning solution that can be deployed to highlight potentially fraudulent activity or transactions within your systems. The solution uses a combination of services including Amazon CloudWatch Event, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon Kinesis Firehose. After running through your datasets (or a default dataset from AWS), you can analyse the output with a tool like QuickSight.

See what this combination of products can discover about your inbound fraudulent transactional activities, then build in mechanisms to mitigate this in the future. Run the machine learning algorithm to highlight, then adjust for new patterns in fraud.

AWS + A1T

These are just three of our new favourite AWS features that we think can be highly useful for many businesses. There’s plenty to be excited about with Amazon Web Services, be it with new services or even ones that have been around for many years. Whether you’re thinking about migrating to cloud for storage and compute, or simply looking to do something a bit complex with your IT infrastructure or data, there’s probably a product (or combination of products) in AWS that can help you out. Need solutions? We can assist and build them for you. Reach out today to learn more.

Julia Sinclair-Jones

Tech writer and ex-software developer with a penchant for travel, techno, and data. Spreading the word of secure, manageable, optimised IT solutions for everyone.