AWS Glue & Lake Formation for Non-Profit Data Modernization

About Customer

A leading global non-profit organization focused on wellness and meditation, the customer operates across 26 countries and serves a large, distributed community. Their network of thousands of centers offers online and in-person meditation programs, aiming to promote well-being and personal growth through ancient Himalayan wisdom.

The organization’s platform supports its mission by managing donations, event scheduling, volunteer engagement, and online learning, helping to reach and empower people globally.

Industry​

Industry​

Services, Non-profit

Solution

Solution

Data Modernization, AWS Data Analytics

Location

Location

Global

Key Objectives

The organization’s primary objective was to make faster, more informed strategic decisions. The key business goals were to:

  • Enable strategic decisions with timely, unified, and accurate leadership KPIs.
  • Improve operational agility by eliminating multi-day reporting delays.
  • Increase donor trust by ensuring high data accuracy and reliability.
  • Strengthen data governance to ensure compliance and audit readiness.
The Challenge

Before modernization, the organization’s critical data was fragmented across disconnected, legacy applications, leading to inconsistent formats and significant data quality issues. This fragmentation required extensive manual data aggregation by technical teams, a process that delayed key operational reporting by two to three days.

This lack of a unified system introduced duplicate and incomplete records, which eroded trust in the data and lacked the auditable governance needed for modern compliance. The organization had no path to real-time insights, creating risk and impacting operational agility and required a centralized data platform to:

  • Unify data from 12 siloed sources
  • Automate ingestion and transformation pipelines
  • Enforce strict data quality and governance
  • Deliver secure, timely analytics and self-service reporting
The Solution

Rysun’s team partnered with the non-profit to actively design and deploy a modern, serverless data platform on AWS. Leveraging proven accelerators and data methodologies, Rysun’s solution centered on automating ingestion, enforcing governance, and enabling self-service analytics in a secure and cost-efficient serverless architecture.

The solution was engineered using a combination of serverless AWS services to meet these goals:

  • Data Lake Foundation: Rysun architected a scalable Amazon S3 data lake as the new single source of truth, with Raw, Curated, and Golden zones to progressively refine data.
  • Automated ETL & Cataloging: To populate the unified data lake, Rysun implemented serverless AWS Glue ETL jobs and crawlers, automating data integration from all 12 sources and slashing manual ETL effort by 70%.
  • Governance and Quality: To solve for governance, Rysun established a central AWS Glue Data Catalog for 100% metadata coverage. Rysun deployed AWS Glue DataBrew to empower data stewards with visual tools, helping improve data accuracy from 85% to 98%. Finally, Rysun configured AWS Lake Formation to enforce fine-grained, row and column-level security and ensure auditable access to all sensitive data.
  • Real-Time Ingestion: To meet the need for timely insights, Rysun engineered a real-time pipeline using Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. This enabled event and campaign updates to appear on dashboards within minutes.
  • Event-Driven Processing: AWS Lambda was used to automate critical data validations and alerts.
  • Analytics & Visualization: For analytics, Rysun implemented Amazon Redshift (with Spectrum) as the high-performance data warehouse for complex queries. Rysun connected this to Amazon QuickSight, delivering self-service, mobile-friendly KPI dashboards to leadership.
  • Security & PII Compliance: To secure the entire platform, Rysun applied a defense-in-depth strategy using AWS KMS for encryption, IAM for least-privilege roles, and Amazon Macie for automated PII discovery.
The Benefits

The new AWS data platform, delivered by Rysun, transformed the organization’s fragmented data landscape into a governed, automated, and near real-time analytics solution. Leadership can now monitor KPIs in real time, improving agility, while cleaner data has improved donor trust.

The business impact was measured by specific, quantifiable metrics:

  • Reporting Latency: Reduced from 2-3 days down to 25 minutes
  • Data Accuracy: Improved from 85% to 98%
  • Manual Effort: Achieved a 75% reduction in manual data processing and aggregation
  • Storage Cost per TB: Realized a 27% reduction through S3 lifecycle policies and compression
  • Governance: Reached 100% coverage for all cataloged datasets with traceable data lineage
  • Platform Uptime: Maintained 99.9% pipeline reliability, monitored via Amazon CloudWatch
Rysun is an AWS Advanced Tier Partner

Rysun is a CMMI Level 5-certified consulting and engineering partner helping enterprises unlock scalable innovation through AI, data, and cloud modernization solutions. As an AWS Advanced Tier Partner, Rysun empowers clients to modernize legacy systems and build intelligent platforms that drive measurable business outcomes. Our expertise spans the full spectrum of data analytics, AI, and Generative AI solutions, leveraging the latest and most advanced AWS services to deliver governed, high-quality data and transformative insights.

Technology Stack

The solution was built using a combination of serverless and managed AWS services to create a modern, automated data platform:

  • Data Lake Storage: Amazon S3
  • Data Integration & Catalog: AWS Glue (ETL, Crawlers, Data Catalog)
  • Data Quality: AWS Glue DataBrew
  • Streaming Ingestion: Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose
  • Data Governance: AWS Lake Formation
  • Data Warehousing: Amazon Redshift (with Redshift Spectrum)
  • Analytics & Visualization: Amazon QuickSight
  • Serverless Processing: AWS Lambda
  • Security & Compliance: IAM, AWS KMS, Amazon Macie