Proving that enterprises are even more interested in big data than ever before, Amazon Web Services Inc. recently announced multiple new serverless analytics offerings for Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR and Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (or MSK).

Why is this all so important?

“Data’s just becoming more and more critical and top of mind for customers,” said Rahul Pathak (pictured), vice president for analytics at AWS. “The pandemic has also accelerated that. We found that customers are really looking to data and analytics and machine learning to find new opportunities. Really everything that we’re trying to do is to connect it to business outcomes for customers.”

Pathak spoke to John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed why data analytics is so important from many angles, as well as AWS’ offerings in this area. (* Disclosure below.)

Governance, flexibility and platformed ecosystems key to data success

One of the key reasons that analytics is so important is because it can help govern and protect one’s data, according to Pathak. Being able to truly govern data should be seen by enterprises as a huge advantage to innovation because horizontal scalability enables vertical specialization around machine learning to be effective.

“Governance is actually an enabler of velocity,” Pathak said. “Once you’ve got the right guardrails in place, you can set people free because they can innovate. You don’t have to be in the way, but you know that your data is protected.”

As customers look to data, analytics and machine learning to find new opportunities, new customer experiences must be efficient, agile and flexible in an unpredictable world, according to Pathak. This is why so many companies want to work with platform-like services that offer a huge ecosystem of data partners out there.

“[Because of this] you’re never on a dead end. You can always evolve and scale as you need to,” Pathak said. “You want to bring these ideas of unified governance and cohesive interfaces so that customers find it easy to adopt the next thing, and so you can start off say with batch analytics, you can expand into real time, you can bring in machine learning and predictive capabilities, you can add natural language. And it’s a big ecosystem of managed services, as well as third parties and partners.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE