MYOB Revises Data Strategy

Small business accounting platform MYOB recently made the migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS), and it’s taking its data along for the move.

Reports Friday (Dec. 16) said Australia’s MYOB is consolidating all of its data onto AWS as it looks to streamline its data management efforts, which are currently divided among reporting teams. Consolidation on AWS will enable MYOB to more efficiently manage its data and use that information for reporting and analytics and to develop and support new products, reports added.

“It was all very traditional; the way businesses handle data today is archaic,” MYOB Chief Technical Advisor Simon Raik-Allen told CRN in an interview. He added that DiUS, also based in Australia, aided MYOB with the move. Together, MYOB and DiUS designed a data lake on AWS using its serverless compute service, reports said.

“The data team doesn’t know what is in the platform anymore,” the executive continued. “They just enable teams to put data in there. Each division is able to write its own analytics.”

That means control over the data is not centralized, reports explained. According to Raik-Allen, MYOB, which has been in operation for 25 years, has so much data and needed a centralized way to manage and make use of that information.

“An API was provided to open the data up to internal developers and enable them to upload data, build custom processing applications and enable two-way communication between the internal data platform and the external-facing MYOB product platform,” the outlet said, quoting DiUS. “Over the top of the end-to-end system was layered automation, monitoring and metrics to ensure that everything that is expected to arrive and be processed is of the correct size and format and is producing the expected results.”