A key concept to understand when migrating to AWS is the physical distribution of cloud resources. AWS organizes its global infrastructure into Regions and Availability Zones (AZ). An AZ consists of one or more discrete data centers within a Region. When you deploy resources in AWS you must define the Region those resources are deployed to and one or more AZs. AWS best practices encourage deployments to be spread across multiple AZs (Multi-AZ) instead of isolating them to a single AZ. Why is this recommended? Read to find out more.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cognos AnalyticsChris ChapmanSeptember 13, 2021Chris Chapman, AWS, Cognos to AWS, CognosComment

Deploying IBM Cognos with an AWS Application Load Balancer

An Application Load Balancer (ALB) may seem unnecessary when thinking about architecting Cognos on AWS. ALBs are most often used in serverless patterns or containerized applications. Those architectures obviously don’t apply to Cognos. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t borrow design patterns from other architectures to benefit a Cognos deployment. Two reasons we recommend leveraging an ALB when deploying Cognos are simplified administration and improving your security posture.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cognos AnalyticsChris ChapmanAugust 6, 2021Chris Chapman, AWS, Cognos to AWS, CognosComment

Amazon QuickSight Complete Guide: Benefits and Pricing

Amazon (AWS) QuickSight is a fully managed business intelligence service. This means it is a cloud-based service that is globally available, has built-in redundancy, and enterprise-grade security. This allows your business to deliver easy-to-understand insights to users, regardless of their location. Because QuickSight is a relatively new BI tool, most people may be unfamiliar with its features and benefits. So, let us take a look at what differentiates QuickSight from other BI tools and then get into editions and pricing.

AWS Databases for IBM Cognos Analytics

Deploying Cognos on AWS immediately raises questions around the Cognos databases. What database type should we use? What service should we use to host them? Let’s dive in and hopefully, I can help you get a much clearer sense of what is best for your organization.

Deploying IBM Cognos on AWS

At PMsquare, we see more and more companies moving Cognos workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The reasons for this move vary from company to company. There may be a desire to reduce architecture and administration costs, improve the reliability of the Cognos infrastructure, dissatisfaction with IBM’s SaaS offering, or the move to the cloud is being mandated by a larger company initiative. Whatever the reason, if you need to migrate Cognos to a public cloud you will likely have many questions and this blog series will answer them!

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cognos AnalyticsChris ChapmanMay 17, 2021Chris Chapman, AWS, Cognos, Cognos to AWSComment

Introducing Cloud Data Delivery

PMsquare is proud to announce the formation of our new Cloud Data Delivery business unit. Cloud Data Delivery brings together decades of experience solving data pipeline, data warehousing, and business intelligence challenges from across the organization into a single entity focused on delivering cloud-first data solutions and migrating existing on-prem data warehouse and BI workloads to the cloud.

What is PMsquare Managed Analytics Services?

The vision was to combine our global organizational reach (offices in: US, Germany, Australia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, India) with our proven methodology to create a repeatable and scalable support arm for our customers’ unique needs. Over the course of the last 3 years, we have implemented and hardened processes to seamlessly coordinate across our global team and deliver value to our customers. Over that time, we have expanded our supported technologies significantly as well, to the point where we now can support many front-end BI tools, major cloud providers, and data pipeline applications.

AWS Data Warehousing (or, What To Do When You're Too Successful)

Everything is great. Business analysts are happy, operations is happy, management is happy. Everyone loves the data warehouse. Kudos! And then the data warehouse becomes a victim of its own success. Can we have some more? More data, more data sources, more queries, more reports, more dashboards, more-more-more. But with the same hardware, same staff, same budget, same service-level agreements. Pop quiz, hotshot -- what do you do?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)Chris ChenJanuary 10, 2021AWS, Data Warehouse, The Cloud, Chris ChenComment

Navigating AWS EC2 Launch Types

Transitioning your company from traditional, on-prem architecture to a cloud native architecture can be a technically consuming project. Along with the technical shift in the way you think about your architecture, you also have to reposition your thinking around pricing and provisioning. Leveraging infrastructure as a service (IaaS) means you no longer need to buy a physical box and wait for it to be installed. You are now able to provision a new instance (sever) as easily as renting a movie from Apple TV or signing up for a Spotify subscription.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)Chris ChapmanDecember 6, 2020Chris Chapman, AWSComment

Why the Cloud Was Made for Data & Analytics

The benefits of cloud computing are widely accepted these days, but we’re still in the early stages of organizations actually moving systems to the cloud. While all sorts of workloads can benefit from cloud computing, your data and analytics systems are a great place to start—or to look at next if you’re already on the cloud journey.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)Mike DeGeusFebruary 7, 2020Strategy, Project Management, Analytics, Mike DeGeus, The CloudComment