AWS Rolls Out Row Zero to Expand Self-Serve Analytics

To improve self-serve data analysis, AWS rolled out Row Zero, a cloud-based spreadsheet that can open billion row datasets, connect directly to data warehouses, and provide enterprise-grade security controls.

According to Peter Cray, VP AWS, “Row Zero empowers anyone with spreadsheet skills to work with massive datasets in Amazon Redshift and Amazon S3 at incredible speed and security. The efficiency gains translate to thousands of saved workforce hours—time our teams now invest in higher-value analysis and decision making.”

In 2024, AWS faced a challenge familiar to enterprise data teams: despite building thousands of BI dashboards, employees still relied on spreadsheets for day-to-day operations and decision making.

BI dashboards and executive scorecards worked well for standardized metrics, but when teams needed to build their own analyses, drill into anomalies, and build financial models, they exported data and finished the work in a spreadsheet.

However, traditional spreadsheets are constrained by the compute and memory resources of employee laptops and a 1 million row limit. As datasets grew, those spreadsheets took hours to make small updates or crashed. Traditional spreadsheets are also limited to static data snapshots because they don’t seamlessly connect to cloud data sources.

AWS set out to find a replacement for traditional spreadsheets that preserved the flexibility while bringing enterprise-grade governance, connectivity, and performance to the last mile of analysis.

Opportunity: Fast, Self-Service Analysis with Centralized Control

The AWS data team observed that most dashboards served a single purpose: enabling CSV exports for spreadsheet-based analysis.

The straightforward fix - disabling exports - was not viable on its own. Those spreadsheets weren’t “nice-to-have”; they represented thousands of operational workflows that teams depended on for planning, forecasting, reconciliation, pipeline management, and business reviews.

AWS wanted a solution that would keep sensitive data governed in the cloud, retain familiar spreadsheet functionality, connect directly to centralized data, and perform well on large data sets.

"To find the right approach, we evaluated 13 different options—from building an internal solution, to virtualizing desktop spreadsheets, to adopting analytics tools with spreadsheet-like interfaces," said Aizaz Manzar, Chief Agentic AI Product Officer, AWS Sales and Marketing. "What we consistently found was that teams didn't want to learn new tools or workflows. They wanted an intuitive spreadsheet that could work at cloud scale while meeting our security requirements. Row Zero gives us the ability to do all of this plus integrated AI-driven insights."

Solution: A cloud-native, spreadsheet built for modern enterprise data

AWS selected Row Zero, a cloud-based spreadsheet for the modern enterprise, designed to work like legacy spreadsheets but without the governance, security, and scalability problems.

Familiar spreadsheet experience—without retraining

Row Zero is immediately familiar to traditional spreadsheet users. It supports the same formulas and features found in legacy spreadsheets, even down to the keyboard shortcuts. This mattered because AWS wanted a solution that could fit naturally into existing business processes, not a new interface or a “spreadsheet-like” UI that required widespread retraining.

Keep governed data in the cloud

Instead of exporting sensitive datasets into static files, Row Zero connects to Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon RDS, Amazon Athena and other data repositories so teams can work in a spreadsheet while data stays within a governed cloud environment.

Row Zero supports enterprise security controls such as RBAC, RLS, OAuth, and network isolation to enforce strict data egress requirements.

Cloud-scale performance for large datasets

With Row Zero, AWS teams can work interactively on datasets that are 1000 times larger than traditional spreadsheet limits. This performance focus was critical for AWS, given the massive size of their datasets.

Outcome: Secure, Fast, Flexible Last Mile Analytics

As more workflows shift into Row Zero, teams are eliminating CSV exports and spreadsheet files on user devices and can iterate faster on large datasets during planning, forecasting, and operational reviews. Connecting spreadsheet analysis directly to centralized datasets also improves consistency and trust versus local snapshots.

AWS showed that BI dashboards don’t eliminate the need for spreadsheets. Dashboards answer the questions data teams anticipated; spreadsheets answer the questions that change every day.

AWS has found success combining high-quality dashboards with a governed spreadsheet layer that enables fast, flexible, self-service analysis without compromising security.