AWS’ Amazon Neptune Goes Live For Financial Services

Amazon Web Services has announced the launch of Amazon Neptune, a fast and fully managed graph database.

The new service stores and navigates highly connected data, allowing developers to create sophisticated, interactive graph applications. There are no upfront costs, licenses, or commitments – customers pay only for the resources they use.

“The days of modern technology companies using relational databases for all of their workloads have come and gone,” said Raju Gulabani, vice president of databases, analytics and machine learning at Amazon Web Services. “As the world has become more connected, applications that navigate large, connected datasets are increasingly more critical for customers. We are delighted to give customers a high-performance graph database service that enables developers to query billions of relationships in milliseconds using standard APIs, making it easy to build and run applications that work with highly connected datasets.”

One of the service’s many perks is the ability to automatically replicate six copies of data across three availability zones, as well as continuously back up data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). In addition, the service offers more than 99.99 percent availability, and automatically detects and recovers from most database failures in less than 30 seconds.

Developers can also benefit from Neptune’s advanced security capabilities, including network security through Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and encryption at rest using AWS Key Management Service (KMS).

“Amazon Neptune is a key part of the toolkit we use to continually expand Alexa’s knowledge graph for our tens of millions of Alexa customers – it’s just day one and we’re excited to continue our work with the AWS team to deliver even better experiences for our customers,” said David Hardcastle, director of Amazon Alexa.

Amazon Neptune is available in the U.S. East (Northern Virginia), U.S. East (Ohio), U.S. West (Oregon) and EU (Ireland) regions. There are plans to expand to additional regions in the coming year.

Neptune is the latest offering from AWS, which is utilized by millions of active customers around the world, including the fastest growing startups, largest enterprises and leading government agencies.

AWS, which launched in 2006 (with Financial Services on AWS debuting in 2016), has gathered human and technological expertise around such areas as PIC, HIPPA, ISO 9000 and other vital standards to make itself more attractive to its clients, said Philip Moyer, director of financial services for AWS, during an interview with PYMNTS’ Karen Webster.

“We can be more global and more secure than they can on their own,” he said.