Most business owners probably don’t have a clear grasp of what Snowflake services are, but first, they must understand data warehousing. Data warehousing has a central information repository from which businesses can analyze the data to inform their decision-making process. A data warehouse is typically useful for relational databases, transactional systems, and other sources.
One of the companies offering this critical service to business enterprises is Snowflake Inc., a cloud computing-based data warehousing company established in Bozeman, Montana.
Because of their cost efficiency and high performance, many businesses handling vast amounts of data now prefer to use cloud-based data platforms. Snowflake offers a cloud service that combines several cloud offerings for easy and secure data management. It also eases the process of accessing data, making it convenient and reliable.
With various pricing options, companies pay for only the services they use in the Snowflake cloud platform. The options available at Snowflake include the standard version, standard+, Enterprise+, and Business Critical+. All these packages offer different functionalities and features, so company owners only have to go for the one that best suits and meets all their data management needs.
Benefits of Using Snowflake in Your Business
Snowflake cloud services come into play as a unique, fully cloud-based system that addresses the issues with the other hardware-based cloud data warehouses. These issues include (but aren’t limited to) data transformation issues, limited scalability, and failures or delays because of high query volumes.
Businesses choosing to use Snowflake’s cloud services will address these problems and experience many more benefits, including:
Quality Performance and Speed
Being that the cloud system is elastic, companies can load data into the system much faster, enabling them to run high volumes of queries simultaneously. It also allows for the scaling up of the virtual data warehouse to utilize the extra computer resources available. Later, companies can scale down the virtual data warehouse and pay for only the exact period of use.
Concurrency and Accessibility
Many businesses experience concurrency issues such as delays or failures while using the old hardware-based data warehouses. The problem exists when many users try to access the system, creating a competition for resources by too many queries.
Support and Storage for Structured and Structured Data
Using Snowflake cloud services, devs can organize semistructured and structured data for analysis and load them into the cloud database. They can then load them without having to first convert or transform the data into a fixed relational schema. Snowflake’s cloud system optimizes storing and query handling for all data.
Availability and Security
In using Snowflake services, there’s a distribution across availability areas and zones of the platform on which it operates. AWS and Azure designs work continuously and withstand network and component failures with the lightest impact on users and customers. The service features a SOC 2 Type II certification and additional security levels like support for PHI data for HIPAA users. It also has encryption available across all networks.
Seamless Data Sharing
Snowflake’s design allows for data sharing among Snowflake users and customers. It enables businesses to share data seamlessly with other data consumers using Snowflake services. The sharing happens through reader accounts that devs create directly from the user interface. The reader account functionality enables the provider to develop and manage a snowflake account for a particular consumer.
Snowflake Partnership with AWS
At the core of any successful business enterprise in the current economy is an aspect of customer centricity. Decisions relating to product and service delivery, customer satisfaction, advocacy, and loyalty should all revolve around the customer.
With the partnership of Snowflake Inc. and Amazon Web Services, these businesses meet customers’ needs, preferences, and tastes. Their association is very technical and strategic and has a clear go-to-market strategy designed to increase its competitive edge.
The Snowflake-AWS partnership improves the capacity of most businesses to thrive in the market. Companies can now take advantage of the hyper-elastic platforms on Amazon and Snowflake to scale up their operations. The data sharing capability improved by the partnership is also massively revolutionizing the retail marketplace. Integrating Snowflake and AWS provides a beautifully combined experience for the customers and ensures their satisfaction at all times.
Snowflake Project With BairesDev
After choosing Snowflake cloud services for data warehousing solutions, companies need to stay up to speed with the best way of implementing them in their business. There are 2 main methods for implementing snowflake projects that all lead to the same results.
End-to-End Path
Choosing this method increases the initial investment cost but will enable both analytics and integrations once completed. For businesses unsure of what they want and having a stable business environment, it ensures that they avoid getting into technical debt by continuously procrastinating tasks.
The end-to-end path helps identify the critical subject areas, like financial reporting, and focuses only on that throughout the data stream. The end of the first phase ensures that financial analytics, financial data integration, and a complete expandable end-to-end solution are all readily available.
Analytics First Path
Comparatively, this takes a different approach and is the most common one in Snowflake POCs. It features a lower initial cost considering services and works while producing business value in a short time frame. The analytics-first approach allows devs to load data from source applications and take advantage of Snowflake’s views for the analytics tool to expand.
The overall implementation cost is higher, but teams end up in a position to create a better-governed data platform, allow application integration, and cut Snowflake costs by sticking to the plan.
Both approaches work out successfully with the right team and need a plan to ensure the execution of the full version. At BairesDev, we work with clients to ensure that Snowflake services meet all their data needs via either path.
