My company is moving our data sources—such as our CRM and Jira—into AWS. I've just received access to explore the tables and Amazon QuickSight, and I'll mainly be working with Amazon Athena and QuickSight rather than managing infrastructure directly. Since I'm new to AWS and work in Revenue Operations and Corporate Strategy instead of Data or IT, what services, concepts, or best practices would be most valuable for me to learn next?
5 Answers
Since you’re in a strategy and operations role, learn how your organization tags AWS resources by team, domain, or initiative. Those tags can support cost allocation, budget alerts, and reporting, which is especially valuable if you’ll be involved in FinOps or tracking the cost of business programs.
Don’t overlook security basics. Learn the CIA triad—confidentiality, integrity, and availability—as well as IAM, authorization, and MFA. Avoid making data publicly accessible unless there’s a clear reason, and review the AWS Well-Architected Framework to understand the main areas of concern, including operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, cost optimization, and sustainability.
A basic Cloud Practitioner learning path is a good starting point, even if you never take the certification exam. It gives you a broad overview of AWS services, pricing, security, and the terminology you’ll encounter without requiring deep technical experience.
Look at the specific AWS account and services supporting your work instead of trying to learn all of AWS. Alongside Athena and QuickSight, you’ll probably encounter S3 for storage and AWS Glue for cataloging or preparing data. Understanding how those pieces fit together will make the analytics workflow much easier to follow.
First, clarify whether you’re mainly consuming analytics or whether you’ll be responsible for managing the AWS environment. If you’re an end user, prioritize learning Athena and QuickSight well—especially querying, organizing, and interpreting data—rather than spending too much time on infrastructure configuration. It’s also useful to understand that Athena commonly queries data stored in S3, while permissions are controlled through IAM.

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