Background
DBS Partners is an accounting firm based out of New York metro that provides CFO and business transformation services, including financial consulting and tax preparation to medium and small enterprises. As part of its services, the firm collects and analyzes large volumes of financial data from its clients to provide insights and advice on various accounting and tax-related matters. In their current practice, they rely on a combination of on-premises servers and cloud-based storage to manage and analyze the data. However, this approach is not scalable with the growing volume and complexity of the data, leading to delays in the delivery of insights and reduced analysis accuracy.
Challenges
The firm faced major challenges with its existing data management and analysis infrastructure, including:
- Limited scalability and performance: The on-premises servers and cloud-based storage could not handle the growing volume of financial data, resulting in slow query times and reduced analysis accuracy.
- High costs and complexity: The combination of on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure resulted in high costs and complexity, making it difficult for the firm to manage and maintain the system.
- Poor security and compliance: The on-premises servers were vulnerable to data breaches and outages and did not meet industry standards for data security and compliance.
Solution
The firm partnered with Digital Alpha, a leading data management and analysis solutions provider, to build a scalable and secure solution for storing and analyzing large volumes of financial data. Digital Alpha leveraged AWS services like Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Athena, which are powerful and cost-effective tools for data management and analysis to build a solution:
- Migrated clients’ financial data from the on-premises servers to Amazon S3, using S3’s security features to ensure the data was protected and encrypted at rest.
- Set up an Amazon Redshift cluster to load and query the financial data from S3, using Redshift’s columnar storage and other performance-enhancing features to enable fast and efficient data analysis.
- Configured Amazon Athena to query the financial data stored in S3 using SQL to quickly and easily explore the data and gain insights.
- Integrated Redshift and Athena using Amazon Redshift Spectrum to query the data in S3 directly from Redshift without the need to load it into the cluster. This reduced the storage utilization on the Redshift cluster and improved performance.
- Provided ongoing support and maintenance to ensure the smooth operation of the S3, Redshift, and Athena infrastructure.
Benefits
The implementation of S3, Redshift and Athena provided several benefits:
- Improved performance and accuracy: Redshift and Athena allowed the firm to analyze large volumes of financial data quickly and accurately, enabling more reliable insights for clients.
- Increased security and compliance: The fully managed and secure nature of S3, Redshift and Athena ensured that clients’ financial data was protected and compliant with industry standards.
- Reduced costs and complexity: S3, Redshift, and Athena eliminated the need for on-premises servers and simplified the data management and analysis infrastructure, resulting in lower costs and improved efficiency.