This can be a visitor submit authored by Akira Mikami, a technical knowledgeable at Furuno Electrical. The content material and opinions on this submit are these of the third-party writer and AWS is just not liable for the content material or accuracy of this submit.
Since efficiently commercializing the world’s first fish finder in 1948, Furuno Electrical has been creating distinctive ultrasonic and digital applied sciences within the marine electronics subject. Underneath the corporate motto of “making the invisible seen”, they’ve have expanded their enterprise centered on marine sensing expertise and are actually extending into subscription-based information companies utilizing Web of Issues (IoT) information. They’re are actively selling the planning and improvement of knowledge companies to comprehend their new administration imaginative and prescient outlined in FURUNO GLOBAL VISION NAVI NEXT 2030.
Like many manufacturing corporations, Furuno Electrical confronted important modifications in income construction and technical structure as they transitioned from conventional enterprise to data-driven enterprise. To achieve this transformation, it was important to construct a basis that promotes information utilization throughout all the group.
This submit demonstrates how Furuno Electrical constructed their system utilizing Amazon DataZone and different Amazon Internet Companies (AWS) companies to handle technical infrastructure fragmentation, set up correct safety governance, and develop an efficient information enterprise promotion system as a part of their journey transitioning from a standard manufacturing firm to a data-driven enterprise.
Challenges
Furuno Electrical confronted three particular challenges in selling their information enterprise: technical infrastructure fragmentation and duplication, lack of safety governance, and underdeveloped information enterprise promotion system.
Mission managers within the information enterprise have been independently designing and constructing information infrastructure, leading to duplication of elements for information assortment, processing, and storage. This case created wasteful improvement investments, hindered efficient use of frequent information, and induced inefficient states that took time to launch companies. Marine information companies together with fishing vessel information assortment and sharing system, FWC, and Furuno Open Platform (FOP) had related capabilities applied individually for every mission alongside the purposeful axes of knowledge assortment, processing, visualization, and evaluation, leading to pointless workload throughout the group.
Safety measures have been thought of and applied individually by every division, and though checklists existed, they weren’t utilized uniformly. This resulted in an absence of consistency in safety measures, duplicate consideration prices for every division, and uncertainty within the comprehensiveness of measures. Built-in threat administration was additionally tough.
The organizational construction wasn’t ready for the iterative improvement processes and long-term income fashions particular to information companies, and there was an absence of mechanisms for cross-departmental information utilization and joint improvement. The distributed operational construction throughout departments made it tough to quickly deploy and constantly enhance information companies. Within the course of of making information companies, it turned vital to construct fully completely different buyer relationships in comparison with conventional product gross sales companies. When it comes to organizational administration and expertise technique, there was a must transition from a top-down, risk-averse, specialised skill-focused construction to a bottom-up, challenge-oriented construction that emphasizes communication expertise and variety.
Resolution overview
Furuno Electrical constructed an information administration basis centered on Amazon DataZone, Amazon Easy Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS Glue, and AWS Management Tower, a complete resolution designed to handle every of the three challenges talked about within the previous part.
Constructing the built-in information platform JuBuRaw
To deal with technical infrastructure fragmentation and duplication, they constructed Junction Structure of Enterprise Uncooked Information (JuBuRaw), a platform that consolidates frequent elements for information assortment, storage, administration, and authentication. Utilizing AWS Cloud Growth Equipment (AWS CDK) to code the infrastructure, they achieved standardization and automation of setting building. This offers consistency and reproducibility, making it simpler so as to add new techniques and migrate present techniques to the frequent platform. Merely by executing CDK, an ordinary information pipeline (utilizing AWS IoT Core, Amazon S3, AWS Glue, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon API Gateway, and AWS Lambda) for a selected system is robotically constructed. This eliminates duplicate design and improvement inside the group, lowering enterprise launch time and enhancing mounted value administration. By standardizing frequent capabilities, they decreased the administration and operation prices of present techniques and enabled the launch of latest techniques in half the time in comparison with earlier than.
The next diagram is the general JuBuRaw structure.

Safety management with AWS Management Tower
To deal with the dearth of safety governance, they applied a complete safety framework centered on AWS Management Tower to use constant safety insurance policies throughout a number of accounts. With automated monitoring techniques utilizing AWS Safety Hub, AWS Config, and AWS CloudTrail and an built-in authentication system utilizing AWS IAM Identification Middle, they supply safety consistency whereas lowering operational prices and administration burden.
With the group’s administration account on the prime, they positioned AWS Management Tower, AWS Organizations, and AWS IAM Identification Middle to realize hierarchical safety administration. By adopting a multi-layered protection construction consisting of account baselines with AWS CloudTrail and AWS Config enabled, log archive environments, and audit and safety operation environments, constant safety insurance policies are utilized to all accounts, enabling early detection and response to safety incidents. This built-in method has decreased the workload for safety responses. This configuration is proven within the following diagram.

Establishing an information democratization basis with Amazon DataZone
To deal with the underdeveloped information enterprise promotion system, they launched Amazon DataZone to streamline information discovery, sharing, and governance throughout the group. They clarified the position division between the infrastructure administration group and the information administration group, centralizing information safety insurance policies, high quality administration, and metadata standardization. With a project-based collaboration setting, they promoted cross-departmental information utilization, establishing a basis to assist the creation and steady monetization of knowledge companies.
Organizational reform and operational construction institution
In parallel with the introduction of technical options, they applied organizational reforms to assist medium- to long-term information utilization. The brand new organizational construction consists of three important roles: the infrastructure administration group, the information administration group, and the chief information officer. The next chart exhibits this organizational construction.

The infrastructure administration group is liable for sustaining and creating the technical basis of the platform, managing a number of accounts utilizing AWS Management Tower, making use of and monitoring safety baselines, and monitoring infrastructure model administration and altering historical past. By specializing in frequent applied sciences, they’ll present a steady platform.
The information administration group is liable for information high quality administration and continuous enchancment utilizing AWS Glue Information High quality, standardization and upkeep of metadata, definition and utility of knowledge safety insurance policies, administration of Amazon DataZone information Catalog, and offering information governance utilizing Amazon DataZone. To maximise the worth of knowledge, they give attention to deeply understanding enterprise necessities and information traits and performing applicable information administration.
The chief information officer is liable for formulating information enterprise methods and figuring out course, selling coordination and collaboration between groups, making choices relating to the evolution of the information administration basis, and fostering an information utilization tradition all through the group. From a strategic perspective, they oversee the entire and bridge enterprise targets and expertise.
This clear division of roles has established an operational construction for efficient information utilization, accelerating the information enterprise creation course of. Moreover, clarifying information possession has improved information high quality and reliability, selling information utilization throughout the group. This construction is sustainable and might flexibly reply to technological modifications and modifications within the enterprise setting.
Advantages of the modernized platform
As a concrete utility instance of the built-in information platform JuBuRaw and organizational construction defined within the earlier part, we introduce the migration mission of the present service SHIPS. This use case is a complete migration case that makes use of all three resolution components of knowledge assortment, administration, and utilization talked about earlier.
Furuno Electrical offers a system referred to as SHIPS that plots ship place info and displays the standing of apparatus put in on ships. By migrating this present service to the JuBuRaw basis, the a number of purposeful enhancements are anticipated.
When it comes to information integration enhancement, through the use of the information catalog operate of Amazon DataZone, it turns into simpler to combine not solely ship place info but additionally varied information sources corresponding to inside techniques, IoT units, different firm techniques, automated identification system (AIS) information, and climate and sea situation information. This permits swift information evaluation and complete ship administration, which implies operators can detect potential points and implement preventive measures earlier than they turn into critical issues. Notably vital is that by storing this information in a typical information lake and retaining them as grasp information, they create an setting the place the information might be simply utilized by different functions.
For safety enhancement, organizations can use Amazon DataZone federated governance with publish-subscribe (pubsub) workflow mechanism and fine-grained entry management capabilities. This implies they’ll implement detailed permissions administration particularly for information property, rows, and columns whereas sustaining unified entry management and information governance throughout a number of AWS accounts and organizational boundaries.
On this case, through the use of the brand new built-in information administration basis, it turns into doable to combine individually designed and constructed information foundations, enhancing each effectivity and performance. A constant information movement from information sources to the information platform after which to particular person functions is realized, enabling versatile information utilization centered on the information lake. Linkage with every utility can be simply realized from the information lake, offering expandability for future information utilization.
This SHIPS migration case is a complete method utilizing the answer components of the JuBuRaw basis and is predicted to function a reference mannequin for future system migrations. It’s anticipated to realize each service high quality enchancment and operational value discount.
Future imaginative and prescient and subsequent steps
Primarily based on the information administration basis they’ve constructed, Furuno Electrical goals to additional develop and deepen information utilization. As a part of their plan to proceed and develop digital transformation, they’re at present beginning with the migration of SHIPS, however plan to regularly migrate different IoT-related companies (corresponding to FOP, FWC, and Ichidake) to the brand new information administration basis sooner or later. That is anticipated to additional strengthen the muse for company-wide information utilization and improve synergies between companies.
Steady enhancement of safe information sharing and entry management can be important. With the rise in information and enlargement of utilization scope, the significance of safety and entry management will additional improve. They’ll optimize the stability between information safety and utilization whereas incorporating practices collected via operations.
Moreover, Furuno Electrical is exploring the enlargement of their information administration capabilities to Amazon SageMaker, particularly utilizing Amazon SageMaker Catalog built-in with Amazon DataZone. This integration will allow them to seamlessly prolong their present information analytics governance workflows into synthetic intelligence and machine studying (AI/ML) workloads. By making use of the identical information discovery, information sharing, and entry management basis throughout each information analytics and AI mannequin improvement, they’ll speed up the event of latest AI-powered companies. The unified governance framework will even present safe and environment friendly AI adoption all through the group.
Via these initiatives, Furuno Electrical is realizing their firm motto of “making the invisible seen” within the subject of knowledge enterprise as nicely. The built-in information platform JuBuRaw isn’t simply an integration of technical foundations however serves as a basis to assist organizational tradition transformation and the creation of latest enterprise fashions. As seen within the SHIPS migration case, utilizing this basis not solely enhances present companies but additionally expands prospects for brand spanking new information utilization.
Via constructing an information basis that may flexibly reply to enterprise development and modifications whereas utilizing a cloud-based setting, Furuno Electrical has efficiently led their digital transformation. They’ll proceed to offer new worth to prospects via the democratization of marine information and speed up the transition to data-driven enterprise.
This case serves as a reference for a lot of manufacturing corporations selling information utilization, exhibiting that approaches from each technical and organizational views are key to success. As Furuno Electrical’s initiatives display, information democratization and efficient utilization play an vital position within the digital transformation of producing.
Concerning the Authors
Akira Mikami is a technical knowledgeable who performed a central position within the FURUNO Information Platform (JuBuRaw) Development Mission at Furuno Electrical Co., Ltd. Specializing in information platform building and structure, he led the implementation of cloud options using AWS. He contributed to attaining environment friendly information administration and strengthening group collaboration, main the mission to success.
Junpei Ozono is a Sr. Go-to-market (GTM) Information & AI options architect at Amazon Internet Companies (AWS) in Japan. He drives technical market creation for information and AI options whereas collaborating with world groups to develop scalable GTM motions. He guides organizations in designing and implementing revolutionary data-driven architectures powered by AWS companies, serving to prospects speed up their cloud transformation journey via trendy information and AI options. His experience spans throughout trendy information architectures together with information mesh, information lakehouse, and generative AI, so prospects can construct scalable and revolutionary options on Amazon Internet Companies (AWS).
Mitsuhiko Nishida is an Enterprise Options Structure Automotive & Manufacturing Group Options Architect at Amazon Internet Companies (AWS) in Japan. He serves as a subject Options Architect for manufacturing prospects, serving to them clear up their enterprise challenges. With experience in generative AI and manufacturing IT, he guides the design and implementation of revolutionary options leveraging cutting-edge applied sciences. He helps manufacturing prospects in constructing environment friendly structure powered by AWS companies to speed up their cloud transformation journey and contribute to their digital transformation initiatives.