Most people know Amazon Web Services as the biggest player in the cloud, but not as many know that AWS is also big on open data and onto a business model that can help everyone get value out of it. Jed Sundwall, AWS Global Open Data Lead, discusses.

This article features information on the AWS Public Datasets program, its business model, experience with clients, and comments provided via an email interview with Jed Sundwall, AWS Global Open Data Lead. Sundwall’s comments have been edited for brevity and clarity and complemented with the author’s own research and comments.

Recently the world’s biggest conference on open data brought together practitioners from government, research, NGOs and business to share their experiences and discuss the way forward. Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the most prominent open data hosts, was there to participate in the collective quest to build sustainable capacities for data driven businesses.

This can be a win-win-win for data publishers, hosts and users alike. Typically it has been governments acting as both publisher and host for open data, businesses either abstaining or being occasional users and the non-profit sector making for most of the use. But there’s something in open data for everyone, and the cloud is a catalyst in this process.

One thing AWS has been recommending to their customers, according to AWS’s Jed Sundwall, is to “make data consistently available online. This might sound strange, but there are a lot of government data products that you can only get by having disks mailed to you, while some other services are simply unreliable. This is one area where cloud infrastructure can really help.”

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