Data lakes have become popular in some organizations as they provide a centralized repository that allows companies to store structured and unstructured data at scale.

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service solution, also known as S3, stores and retrieves any amount of data, from anywhere. It offers the enterprise benefits for security and management of shared data sets, according to Kevin Miller, vice president and general manager of S3 at AWS.

“A lot of the core benefits of S3 really play directly into what customers are looking for when they’re building a data lake,” Miller said. “They’re looking for low-cost storage, some place that they can put shared data sets and make it very easy for other teams and businesses to access a set of data, as well as have all the management around it.”

Miller spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante at the recent AWS Storage Day, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the evolution of data lakes at Amazon S3. (* Disclosure below.)

Moving data closer to the business

Data sets being closer to decision-makers in businesses and having fewer layers between business problems and the technology that provides solutions is critical. Amazon S3 embodies this idea by using data lakes, according to Miller.

“Where [data lakes are] coming together is around making it very easy to federate, to know what data sources I have, to know what the rules are around accessing it, to remove as much of the friction as we can around just the basics of provisioning access,” he stated.

Data lakes may have started around analytics, but new technologies have made this type of enterprise solution expand greatly. As such, keeping data federation easy to manage is a top priority right now, Miller added.

“If you left [date sets] unstructured or left [them] without any kind of governance, you can quickly develop a lot of unusable data,” Miller said. “And so I think we’re seeing the evolution in customers putting more of a governance structure in place around it, really trying to understand and catalog the data sets they have.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS Storage Day:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for AWS Storage Day. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE