Amazon Web Services (AWS) welcomed a new addition to its cloud catalog today with the launch of AWS Data Exchange as an aid to help customers find, subscribe to, and use third-party data in the cloud.

Historically, subscribing to third-party data meant clearing a number of lofty hurdles such as coding multiple disparate APIs, managing sensitive billing relationships and licensing agreements and updates, or waiting weeks to receive shipped physical media.

According to AWS, Data Exchange has been designed to remove those hurdles and simplify third-party data sharing in the cloud. 

The cloud giant is pitching the new cloud-native service as a secure and efficient mode of transportation from more than 80 qualified data providers across industries, including finance, healthcare, life sciences, and retail, to exchange data with customers in a matter of minutes. 

And for data providers, AWS Data Exchange claims to eliminate the need to build and maintain infrastructure for data storage, delivery, billing, and entitling. 

The Data Exchange launch comes after Amazon’s cloud business fell short of Wall Street’s Q3 expectations and sent its stock tumbling in after-hours trading in late October.

While Amazon beat total revenue expectations, reporting $70 billion for third quarter 2019 revenue — a 24% increase year over year — compared to $68.7 billion expected, AWS posted lower-than-expected revenue at $9 billion versus analysts’ expected $9.19 billion.

These days, as the value of data is likened to gold, every organization aspires to extract as much value as possible from its data, thus positioning it as the nucleus of sorts to how companies operate. 

“Companies are increasingly using third-party data to complement their internal data and deliver value for their customers,” wrote AWS in a blog post. 

But the way providers deliver data to subscribers has not changed in years. 

“Customers have asked us for an easier way to find, subscribe to, and integrate diverse data sets into the applications, analytics, and machine-learning models they’re running on AWS. Unfortunately, the way customers exchange data hasn’t evolved much in the last 20 years,” said Stephen Orban, GM of AWS Data Exchange in a prepared statement. 

“AWS Data Exchange gives our customers the ability to quickly integrate third-party data in the workloads they’re migrating to the cloud, while giving qualified data providers a modern and secure way to package, deliver, and reach the millions of AWS customers worldwide.”

Customers can select and subscribe to third-party data sources by way of the AWS Marketplace where organizations can also access the AWS Data Exchange API or console to transfer data into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). And when a provider publishes a new revision of their data, AWS Data Exchange will alert subscribers. 

From the company that knows virtually everything about its customers including what they buy, what they look at, and their shipping address, AWS Data Exchange claims that it prohibits sharing sensitive personal data and any information that is not already lawfully and publicly available.