Cloud Hosted Data Science Will Transform Businesses More Quickly in 2019
Cloud-based data science and business intelligence solutions offer inherent self-service capabilities, granting users greater control over data parameters and report queries. This approach enables faster decision-making and enterprise-wide insight sharing. Cruz Street has successfully deployed this model across mid-market and enterprise organizations, delivering valuable insights through a scalable, cost-effective cloud platform.
A key differentiator in Cruz Street's offering is enhanced API, micro-services, data, and BI layer integration, constructed using AWS Big Data best practices. The platform accelerates data ingestion, transformation, and analysis.
Cruz Street Partners with AWS in 2019, Clients Reap the Benefits
Cruz Street provides digital transformation and data science solutions addressing technology-driven business challenges. The company's partnership with Amazon Web Services introduced the MyCDO data management platform, integrated with Amazon QuickSight for business intelligence.
QuickSight delivers cloud-powered BI capabilities enabling users to create and publish interactive dashboards with predictive analytics and visualizations. MyCDO provides organizations with "a Chief Data Officer On-Demand," eliminating expensive training and steep learning curves associated with data science initiatives. The platform offers fast performance, stunning visualizations, and affordable pay-per-session pricing, with planned machine learning features for forecasting, auto-narrating, and anomaly detection.
Cruz Street Helps Value Generating Organizations Transform
During the second half of 2018, Cruz Street worked with two distinct organizations — a global digital education publisher and Volunteer New York! (VNY), a nonprofit — both struggling with underutilized data.
VNY faced disparate data sources, poor customer visibility, broken lead flow, and minimal actionable insights. Cruz Street mapped the organization's data ecosystem, identified breakage points, and identified growth opportunities. By consolidating data sources and implementing third-party data enrichment, Cruz Street unified information into a single repository. The team served as advisors and solutions architects for customer data modeling, database solutions, and predictive modeling, enhancing VNY's ability to generate and prioritize leads for improved marketing performance.
CRISP-DM Methodology
Cruz Street implements the Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM), providing a structured framework for data-driven solutions.
For VNY, understanding existing challenges was critical — the organization maintained multiple databases for donors, volunteers, and other functions. Cruz Street's process involved:
- Understanding the organizational data challenges
- Enhancing and refining data quality
- Modeling optimized datasets
- Evaluating findings with stakeholders to ensure alignment with business objectives
- Deploying solutions ranging from dashboards to repeatable data mining processes
Cruz Street created a comprehensive QuickSight Dashboard displaying all insights, accessible through the Cruz Street portal.
Smarter Data, Smarter Decisions: A Big Data Case Study from Cruz Street
> "Volunteer New York! has gained valuable knowledge about our volunteers and donors thanks to Cruz Street. Through their work using AWS and QuickSight, we will be able to apply the findings and increase our effectiveness working with volunteers and for our community." — Alisa Kesten, Managing Director, Volunteer New York!
Cruz Street built an end-to-end solution powered by QuickSight. VNY's current workflow:
Data Layers:
- As-Is Layer: Raw data uploaded via S3 through SFTP
- Governed Layer: The foundation of VNY's data lake, built with Amazon technology following cloud provider data lake principles. Third-party data cleansing partnerships accelerated the pipeline from raw to stable data through ETL procedures
- Golden Layer: A single, authoritative data source housed in Amazon Aurora, a fast and secure relational database
The API and micro-services layers interface between the MyCDO client portal and QuickSight visualizations embedded within the portal.
QuickSight generates interactive business intelligence dashboards automatically, providing rich visualizations and strategic insights. Users accessing the MyCDO portal discover previously hidden data stories through sophisticated visualizations.
The MyCDO platform enables clients to upload data and immediately access advanced data science capabilities alongside stunning visualizations. Cruz Street's mission centers on democratizing data science through QuickSight integration. By delivering faster, actionable insights, business executives make more informed decisions.