Amazon.com Inc. has introduced an enterprise edition of its QuickSight analytics service that aims to help companies better secure the data they’re processing.

The introduction comes a month after the company launched QuickSight into general availability. The biggest improvement over the standard tier is a built-in encryption feature for protecting records when they’re not being actively used.

More specifically, the capability is designed to secure information kept in SPICE, the custom data engine that powers QuickSight. Amazon describes the system as a cross between a columnar and an in-memory store that can rapidly execute analytic queries with a high degree of reliability.

The other major selling point of QuickSight Enterprise is integration with Microsoft Active Directory. Companies can now use the ubiquitous user management platform to manage who can access their analytics environments. It’s a small but significant addition that stands to provide a few major operational benefits.

First, organizations can now let analysts log into QuickSight using their Active Directory credentials instead of having manually to create a new account for each user. The resulting time savings should speed up the on-boarding process, thus making it easier to adopt the service. Administrators then can control access permissions through the same centralized interface they use to manage their companies’ other applications.

The Active Directory integration makes it possible to add or remove accounts as needed while enforcing various restrictions such as automatic session timeouts. End-users, in turn, can take advantage of the system’s single sign-on feature to spare themselves the trouble of memorizing another password.

The new security capabilities expand upon the expansive feature set of QuickSight Standard, which already lends itself well to enterprise analytics projects. Amazon claims that the service can analyze data from a variety of data sources and support “hundreds of thousands of users.” Moreover, it provides these capabilities for what the company says is a small fraction of the price of traditional business intelligence tools.

QuickSight Enterprise starts at $18 per user per month and comes with 10 gigabyte of data storage by default. Companies can add more capacity for $0.38 per gigabyte per month.

Image courtesy of Amazon