Last week was jam-packed for the Starburst team here in Europe. As well as the delayed Euro 2020 football Championship finally kicking off, and what a start to the tournament, we had the pleasure of being Platinum sponsors and presenting at the AWS Summit EMEA, the largest two-day virtual conference for developers and IT professionals using AWS, and we also launched Starburst Stargate, the industry’s first gateway for global cross-cloud analytics. Let’s dive into some of the highlights from the conference and also explore what Stargate means for us in EMEA.
Video above: I presented alongside Richard Jarvis, Chief Analytics Officer at EMIS during the AWS Innovation Day on 10th June – catch the session on-demand: https://aws.amazon.com/events/summits/online/emea/
AWS Summit EMEA highlights
The folks at AWS organised an insightful couple of days at the AWS Summit EMEA – a real treat for more than 500,000 or so members of Europe’s cloud community, who heard from top-class brands and thought leaders on a variety of different topics, sharing their knowledge, advice, and discussing the challenges they face in the modern data world.
The session that was especially memorable to me was the “EU regulation: Comply, innovate and grow” session. This included valuable updates and guidance on European data policy and regulation, which is an important topic for businesses with a presence in the European Union (EU) due to the need to ensure they are remaining compliant with data law while not sacrificing competitiveness.
Intel shared insights and advice on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) when integrated into operational workflows and the key considerations businesses need to ensure to make the most out of AI and ML investments. We also heard from Sally Eaves, CEO and Founder of Aspirational Futures, and Thomas Blood, AWS Digital Innovation Leader, in a superb fireside chat session where they explored the culture changes of digital transformation and how organisations should navigate employees when planning for digital transformation.
Starburst also ran its own session with EMIS at the summit – did you see it? If not, Richard Jarvis, Chief Analytics Officer at Starburst client EMIS Health, and I chatted about the challenges of managing and analysing healthcare data and how EMIS used X Analytics to make siloed data securely accessible to enable rapid patient analysis in near real-time. It’s well worth going back and watching – EMIS has delivered unprecedented data access and analytics to healthcare professionals during the pandemic and is an excellent example of the power of a single point of access to all data.
All sessions at the AWS Summit, including Starburst and EMIS’ “Empowering clinicians and researchers with EMIS-X Analytics” session, are available on demand here.
Starburst Stargate brings global cross-cloud analytics
Last week was also the launch of Starburst Stargate, an add-on for Starburst Enterprise that enables organisations to run cross-cloud analytics on data distributed across the globe. Combining high performance connectivity, fine-grained access control, and intelligent query optimisation across multiple Starburst clusters in multiple clouds or regions, Stargate provides a window into your data for analytics, without the need for it to be moved across clouds.
Given the sensitivity around data regulation and data sovereignty, the availability of Stargate is an important development. The increasingly complicated data residency and privacy landscape poses a major threat to companies using and relying on globally distributed data – the marketplace needed a solution for analysing data across physical boundaries and now it has one. Starburst Stargate can give customers peace of mind that they are being compliant within data privacy laws, while enabling them to gain the valuable and accurate insights into their data across different countries that they need.
If you missed the launch of Stargate, you can find out more about how it works in our resource centre here and in this handy blog by Starburst CEO Justin Borgman.
As always, if you have any queries that you’d like to fire my way or to discuss any of the great talks at AWS Summit EMEA, don’t hesitate to get in touch. And if you’re following the Euro 2020 Championship too, let me know who you think might win it in the comments below.
