It is a visitor put up authored by Akira Mikami, a technical professional at Furuno Electrical. The content material and opinions on this put up are these of the third-party writer and AWS shouldn’t be chargeable for the content material or accuracy of this put up.
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 discipline. Below the corporate motto of “making the invisible seen”, they’ve have expanded their enterprise centered on marine sensing expertise and at the moment are extending into subscription-based information companies utilizing Web of Issues (IoT) information. They’re are actively selling the planning and growth of information companies to comprehend their new administration imaginative and prescient outlined in FURUNO GLOBAL VISION NAVI NEXT 2030.
Like many manufacturing firms, 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 the complete group.
This put up demonstrates how Furuno Electrical constructed their system utilizing Amazon DataZone and different Amazon Internet Providers (AWS) companies to deal with 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.
Challenge 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 example created wasteful growth investments, hindered efficient use of frequent information, and precipitated 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 comparable capabilities carried out individually for every challenge alongside the useful axes of information assortment, processing, visualization, and evaluation, leading to pointless workload throughout the group.
Safety measures have been thought-about and carried out individually by every division, and though checklists existed, they weren’t utilized uniformly. This resulted in a scarcity of consistency in safety measures, duplicate consideration prices for every division, and uncertainty within the comprehensiveness of measures. Built-in threat administration was additionally troublesome.
The organizational construction wasn’t ready for the iterative growth processes and long-term income fashions particular to information companies, and there was a scarcity of mechanisms for cross-departmental information utilization and joint growth. The distributed operational construction throughout departments made it troublesome to quickly deploy and constantly enhance information companies. Within the course of of making information companies, it turned obligatory to construct completely totally different buyer relationships in comparison with conventional product gross sales companies. By way of organizational administration and expertise technique, there was a have to transition from a top-down, risk-averse, specialised skill-focused construction to a bottom-up, challenge-oriented construction that emphasizes communication abilities and variety.
Answer overview
Furuno Electrical constructed a knowledge administration basis centered on Amazon DataZone, Amazon Easy Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS Glue, and AWS Management Tower, a complete resolution designed to deal with 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 Knowledge (JuBuRaw), a platform that consolidates frequent elements for information assortment, storage, administration, and authentication. Utilizing AWS Cloud Improvement Equipment (AWS CDK) to code the infrastructure, they achieved standardization and automation of surroundings development. This supplies consistency and reproducibility, making it simpler so as to add new methods and migrate current methods to the frequent platform. Merely by executing CDK, a regular information pipeline (utilizing AWS IoT Core, Amazon S3, AWS Glue, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon API Gateway, and AWS Lambda) for a particular system is mechanically constructed. This eliminates duplicate design and growth inside the group, decreasing enterprise launch time and bettering fastened price administration. By standardizing frequent capabilities, they decreased the administration and operation prices of current methods and enabled the launch of recent methods 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 shortage of safety governance, they carried out a complete safety framework centered on AWS Management Tower to use constant safety insurance policies throughout a number of accounts. With automated monitoring methods utilizing AWS Safety Hub, AWS Config, and AWS CloudTrail and an built-in authentication system utilizing AWS IAM Id Middle, they supply safety consistency whereas decreasing operational prices and administration burden.
With the group’s administration account on the prime, they positioned AWS Management Tower, AWS Organizations, and AWS IAM Id 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 strategy has decreased the workload for safety responses. This configuration is proven within the following diagram.

Establishing a knowledge 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 function division between the infrastructure administration group and the info administration group, centralizing information safety insurance policies, high quality administration, and metadata standardization. With a project-based collaboration surroundings, they promoted cross-departmental information utilization, establishing a basis to assist the creation and steady monetization of information companies.
Organizational reform and operational construction institution
In parallel with the introduction of technical options, they carried out organizational reforms to assist medium- to long-term information utilization. The brand new organizational construction consists of three foremost roles: the infrastructure administration group, the info administration group, and the chief information officer. The next chart exhibits this organizational construction.

The infrastructure administration group is chargeable 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 will present a steady platform.
The information administration group is chargeable for information high quality administration and continuous enchancment utilizing AWS Glue Knowledge High quality, standardization and upkeep of metadata, definition and utility of information safety insurance policies, administration of Amazon DataZone information Catalog, and offering information governance utilizing Amazon DataZone. To maximise the worth of information, they concentrate on deeply understanding enterprise necessities and information traits and performing applicable information administration.
The chief information officer is chargeable for formulating information enterprise methods and figuring out course, selling coordination and collaboration between groups, making selections relating to the evolution of the info administration basis, and fostering a knowledge 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 info 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 surroundings.
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 challenge of the present service SHIPS. This use case is a complete migration case that makes use of all three resolution parts of information assortment, administration, and utilization talked about earlier.
Furuno Electrical supplies a system referred to as SHIPS that plots ship place info and displays the standing of kit put in on ships. By migrating this current service to the JuBuRaw basis, the a number of useful enhancements are anticipated.
By way of 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 in addition varied information sources comparable to inner methods, IoT gadgets, different firm methods, 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 become critical issues. Significantly essential is that by storing this information in a typical information lake and retaining them as grasp information, they create an surroundings the place the info may 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 will implement detailed permissions administration particularly for information belongings, 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 potential to combine individually designed and constructed information foundations, bettering each effectivity and performance. A constant information stream from information sources to the info platform after which to particular person functions is realized, enabling versatile information utilization centered on the info lake. Linkage with every utility will also be simply realized from the info lake, offering expandability for future information utilization.
This SHIPS migration case is a complete strategy utilizing the answer parts 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 price discount.
Future imaginative and prescient and subsequent steps
Based mostly on the info 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 progressively migrate different IoT-related companies (comparable 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 also be important. With the rise in information and enlargement of utilization scope, the significance of safety and entry management will additional enhance. They’ll optimize the stability between information safety and utilization whereas incorporating practices amassed by 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 current 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 growth, they will speed up the event of recent AI-powered companies. The unified governance framework can even present safe and environment friendly AI adoption all through the group.
By means of these initiatives, Furuno Electrical is realizing their firm motto of “making the invisible seen” within the discipline of information enterprise as effectively. 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 recent enterprise fashions. As seen within the SHIPS migration case, utilizing this basis not solely enhances current companies but in addition expands potentialities for brand new information utilization.
By means of constructing a knowledge basis that may flexibly reply to enterprise development and modifications whereas utilizing a cloud-based surroundings, Furuno Electrical has efficiently led their digital transformation. They’ll proceed to supply new worth to clients by 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 firms selling information utilization, displaying that approaches from each technical and organizational views are key to success. As Furuno Electrical’s initiatives show, information democratization and efficient utilization play an essential function within the digital transformation of producing.
Concerning the Authors
Akira Mikami is a technical professional who performed a central function within the FURUNO Knowledge Platform (JuBuRaw) Development Challenge at Furuno Electrical Co., Ltd. Specializing in information platform development and structure, he led the implementation of cloud options using AWS. He contributed to reaching environment friendly information administration and strengthening group collaboration, main the challenge to success.
Junpei Ozono is a Sr. Go-to-market (GTM) Knowledge & AI options architect at Amazon Internet Providers (AWS) in Japan. He drives technical market creation for information and AI options whereas collaborating with international groups to develop scalable GTM motions. He guides organizations in designing and implementing revolutionary data-driven architectures powered by AWS companies, serving to clients speed up their cloud transformation journey by trendy information and AI options. His experience spans throughout trendy information architectures together with information mesh, information lakehouse, and generative AI, so clients can construct scalable and revolutionary options on Amazon Internet Providers (AWS).
Mitsuhiko Nishida is an Enterprise Options Structure Automotive & Manufacturing Group Options Architect at Amazon Internet Providers (AWS) in Japan. He serves as a discipline Options Architect for manufacturing clients, serving to them resolve 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 clients in constructing environment friendly structure powered by AWS companies to speed up their cloud transformation journey and contribute to their digital transformation initiatives.
