Amazon Web Services consultant shares data analytics insights

Through an analytics workshop, participants learned how cloud computing can be utilized by organizations to innovate, experiment and iterate.

More than 120 students, faculty members and professionals gained a deeper understanding about data and analytics best practices through an Amazon Web Services workshop held Nov. 7 at Elon University.

The “AWSome Analytics Workshop,” sponsored by Elon’s Center for Organizational Analytics and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, highlighted how students, educators and industry professionals are using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop, deploy and operate secure applications and IT services that improve agility and reduce costs for organizations.

AWS provides scalable, low-cost infrastructure platforms through cloud computing to hundreds of thousands of businesses in 190 countries around the world.

Tony Nguyen, a senior consultant at AWS, discussed big data, data warehousing, business intelligence and visualization, real time analytics and streaming, and the Internet of Things (IoT). He also answered questions on AWS’ deploy and automate infrastructure.

In his role as lead big data analytics consultant and solution architect for the public sector, Nguyen helps customers and partners design and architect solutions to big data and analytics problems for the cloud across a variety of verticals such as finance, health, defense and education. Prior to joining AWS, Nguyen spent several years designing, architecting and implementing large-scale data and information processing systems for critical infrastructure, cyber defense and social media analytics.

“It is our intention through the Center for Organizational Analytics to create opportunities for our community members to learn the latest and best practices in data analytics,” said Associate Professor Haya Ajjan, director of the Center for Organizational Analytics. “The information presented in the AWS workshop is timely. The AWS tool Quicksight could be used in the classroom to easily uncover hidden data patterns in large datasets. The ins and outs of setting up IoT and streaming data is a topic that is increasingly important in our day and time.”