By Venkat Elumalai, Knoware Practice Lead
There used to be a time when setting up a data warehouse involved investing in massive amounts of hardware that was usually sited “on premises”.
Today, data and data warehouses have essentially gone “off piste” thanks to technology and providers like Snowflake.
What is Snowflake?
Snowflake is a cloud-native platform service that can be platformed on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud which does away with the need for maintaining and supporting expensive on premises servers. There’s no software to install, configure, or manage and it is straight -forward and easy to move data into Snowflake using standard ETL solutions.
With Snowflake being built entirely in the cloud, it effectively tackles and resolves many of the issues that hampered traditional hardware-based data warehouses.
Workloads scale independently from one another, making it an ideal platform for data engineering, data transformation, data sharing, developing data applications and managing high query volumes.
How can Snowflake benefit your business or organisation?
1. Speed, security & performance
Snowflake’s unique multi-cluster shared data architecture delivers the performance, scale, elasticity, and concurrency today’s organisations expect.
It features storage, compute, and global services layers that are physically separated but logically integrated, providing a platform delivered as-a-service where you can scale up and scale down as required.
Snowflake is ISO certified and includes a multitude of features such as dynamic data masking and end-to-end encryption for data in transit and at rest, which means users can focus on analysing their data, not protecting it.
2. Cost control
With Snowflake architecture allowing storage and compute to scale independently, it means that customers can use and pay for storage and computation separately. Users can scale up or down as needed and pay for only the separate computation or storage resources that they actually use, billed in terabytes stored per month, with CPU billed on a per-second basis.
While Snowflake provides infinitely scalable storage and compute, it does need to be architected and configured correctly (with well-constructed monitoring and control protocols in place to ensure maximum cost benefits).
3. Data sharing capabilities
One of the sectors that we at Knoware see as being most likely to benefit massively from what Snowflake has to offer is the public sector. This is because Snowflake can offer nearly seamless data sharing – government organisations can quickly share secure governed data in real time, whether they are a Snowflake customer or not.
Knoware also see Snowflake as being highly complementary to SAS environments with the ability to create significant performance improvement and cost reductions (again where when correctly architected by experts like Knoware).
So, if you’re interested to understand more about how Snowflake and Knoware can improve your business outcomes, particularly within a public sector SAS environment, then reach out to one of the practice team today.