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Amazon AppFlow Automates Data Transfers from SaaS Apps to AWS
A new Amazon Web Services (AWS) solution aims to give organizations an easier way to transfer data from their various software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications to the AWS cloud.
Amazon AppFlow integrates with a small but growing list of popular SaaS applications (13 as of this writing), enabling data to flow securely from those applications to AWS solutions such as Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift. The service is designed to replace traditional methods of transferring data from third-party SaaS applications, which can be time- and labor-intensive, not to mention costly.
"Developers spend huge amounts of time writing custom integrations so they can pass data between SaaS applications and AWS services so that it can be analysed; these can be expensive and can often take months to complete," AWS said in its announcement Wednesday. "If data requirements change, then costly and complicated modifications have to be made to the integrations. Companies that don't have the luxury of engineering resources might find themselves manually importing and exporting data from applications, which is time-consuming, risks data leakage, and has the potential to introduce human error."
Amazon AppFlow automates the transfer of data from SaaS applications into AWS, and vice versa. Organizations can opt to perform transfers as needed, in regular intervals or in response to specific business events.
With each transfer, Amazon AppFlow offers options for mapping, filtering, merging and masking data, so the data can be formatted without additional steps. Each transfer can be as large as 100GB, meaning organizations "don't need to break data down into batches," AWS explained.
Amazon AppFlow already encrypts all data in motion, but as an added security measure, SaaS applications that have a standing integration with AWS PrivateLink have the ability to transfer data to AWS without exposing it to the public Internet.
Currently supported SaaS applications include Google Analytics, Slack, Salesforce, Zendesk and Trend Micro, though AWS foresees adding "hundreds more" in the future. More information is available here.