AWS has given its flagship monitoring service, Amazon CloudWatch, a major upgrade that positions it to redefine how organizations handle operational, security, and compliance data. The enhancement, announced at AWS re:Invent 2025, introduces a unified data management and analytics platform with the purpose of simplifying data ingestion and reducing duplication, thereby opening up powerful analytics across previously siloed data streams.
Traditionally, organizations have struggled with fragmented observability systems where operational logs, security events, and compliance records sit in disparate silos. The result is slower investigations, higher infrastructure costs, and often duplicated effort-for example, complicated ETL pipelines required to centralize data for thorough analysis.
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AWS’s enhancement brings all these fragmented data streams into a unified, normalized store. CloudWatch can now natively and automatically ingest logs from a wide range of AWS-native services-most notably AWS CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, and AWS WAF-along with a handful of key third-party sources, including CrowdStrike, Okta, Microsoft Office 365, and SentinelOne. Plus, through native support for the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework and OpenTelemetry formats, CloudWatch ensures consistency in incoming data.
The new unified store integrates seamlessly with Amazon S3 Tables and provides Apache Iceberg-compatible access, which allows teams to conduct analytics not only inside CloudWatch’s native console but also using tools such as Amazon Athena, Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio, or any third-party Iceberg-compatible application. And that’s not all when it comes to analytic flexibility: it also features “Facets”, an intuitive filtering interface that easily lets users generate queries based on source, region, account, and log type.
Driving Business Benefits Through Unified Data
But over and above convenience, this update really represents a fundamental shift in how telemetry and governance data will be handled within the enterprise.
1. Reduced Costs and Simplified Architecture
This consolidates log ingestion and processing for businesses, reducing the need for complex ETL pipelines and multiple independent data stores. For companies that have been storing logs separately for operations, security, and compliance, these can now be aggregated into CloudWatch, easing maintenance and significantly reducing storage and management costs-not to mention reducing MTTR in incident investigations.
2. Faster Insights and Better Collaboration
Prior to this, siloed data impeded cross-team collaboration. DevOps, security, and compliance teams can share one source of truth, instead of putting together fragmented datasets. This results in improved operations efficiency, quicker issue detection, and remediation, specifically in hybrid or multi-account AWS environments.
3. Improved Compliance and Security Monitoring
Standardization of data formats through frameworks such as the OCSF allows for deeper analytics and quicker identification of anomalies. By normalizing all data between security, operational, and business applications, an organization can trace network behavior to higher-order activities, such as unauthorized API changes, in real time. Businesses that have to operate under strict compliance rules, like financial institutions or healthcare providers, will especially benefit from converged and normalized audit trails.
Broader Industry Impacts
The move toward unified telemetry marks the maturation of the data management ecosystem.
Key implications for the broader industry include:
• Shift to Unified Observability Platforms: AWS’s new offering marks a trend wherein the domains of observability, security analytics, and governance are not dealt with separately. The same can be expected in the way future data platforms will adopt integrated approaches to optimize workflows and reduce bottlenecks.
• Increased Adoption of Open Standards: With support for OCSF and Iceberg, AWS is promoting industrywide standards that make cross-platform interoperability easier and reduce vendor lock-in. This is a trend that is probably going to accelerate innovation as vendors compete on analytics performance rather than on proprietary schema.
• Lower Barrier to Analytics-Driven Decisions: Putting advanced analytics within reach for operational and security teams rather than making them dependent on specialized data engineering can democratize insights throughout the organization. Smaller teams scale analytics, leveraging machine learning-powered analytics and proactive threat detection.
Final Thoughts
AWS’s unified data strategy for CloudWatch represents a major leap forward for the data management industry and for organizations deploying complex, cloud-native operating models. Migrating disparate data sets into one single, normalized repository with flexible analytics options, businesses are now equipped to simplify operations, cut costs, and build better insights in real time across teams.
As large companies continue to migrate to cloud-native architectures, the role of unified data ecosystems will only expand. AWS‘s update to CloudWatch moves us one step closer to an intelligent, integrated, and universally accessible approach to observability and data governance.
