The Power of Data in the Cloud: Unleashing Business Impact
The average enterprise generates about 2 petabytes of data per year. Every decision, operation, and strategy revolves around how effectively we handle and exploit it.
The cloud offers a more scalable and cost-effective way to store and manage large amounts of data, which is why 97% of organizations use cloud solutions. It’s not just a trend – it’s a strategy for future success.
Still, data leaders find themselves under increasing pressure to prove ROI to their C-Suite peers. It’s understandable that many struggle to see how a vast expanse of data translates into tangible business value.
This isn’t a failing on your part, or theirs. It’s the inevitable outcome of late-stage analytics, BI, and Snowflake being ahead of its time.
Overcoming Challenges in Late-Stage Analytics and BI
We were told the issue was data silos and that centralizing data was the antidote. However, this was only a partial solution that exposed organizations to a wave of governance and compliance issues, risking both financial and reputational damage.
Next, we discovered data teams often lacked the necessary context to understand business issues as their business-expert counterparts, leading to a vicious cycle where over 50% of a data team’s time was consumed by creating and updating dashboards. Self-service was praised as the remedy, but in reality, it frequently fell short of the promise.
In the end, these longstanding paradigms and familiar methodologies have blinded us from translating insights into actions.
It’s like an itch you can’t scratch. And in the end, it leaves everyone frustrated and dissatisfied.
Until now.
In truth, we couldn’t fully grasp the potential of cloud computing until we amassed enough data to exploit it. Just like with the advent of the internet, it has taken time to understand how to truly leverage the power of the Cloud.
As possibilities transformed into realities, Snowflake could create innovative infrastructure solutions like SnowPark and data sharing, that effectively turns the Data Cloud into a cloud-based operating system by data.
The question becomes, if our data lives within this operating system, why are we still using business applications that move data outside of it? It’s like fitting a square peg into a round, horribly inefficient, expensive, and insecure round hole.
The answer lies in the Snowflake ecosystem and its native applications. They let us build specific, Snowflake-native applications using our own proprietary data.
This is the real game-changer and the path to maximizing the real value of Snowflake.
The potential of the Snowflake-native app ecosystem is truly exciting because it completely transforms how we approach software development. Classic DevOps and engineering standards, enhanced integrations, and robust open-source libraries can all be used in Snowflake.
Developers can code within Snowflake, using their favorite language, eliminating the complexity of managing large-scale applications and data pipelines. This effectively turns Snowflake into a highly flexible beast that can handle a wide array of workloads. It also presents an ideal framework for the deploy- ment of machine learning development and deployment, and data-hungry applications.
Snowflake now arms data-driven organizations with the ability to construct a self-operating system, utilizing AI and ML to automate data operations, enhancing both efficiency and accuracy. It delivers true self-service capabilities by allowing business users to directly engage with data and applications, streamlining their processes.
For example, Elementum built the only workflow platform native in Snowflake to take advantage of its architecture. It allows business users to turn data into triggers for action, build process automations with a single sentence, and develop self-improving workflows that adapt to their business needs – without a single line of code, or extra demand from technical teams. And, of course, it’s all done directly within Snowflake without data ever leaving.
It’s an exciting new world. The good news is, we’re only just beginning to explore what’s possible with Snowflake.
The bad news is that the vast majority of organizations lack the maturity to fully take advantage of the Snowflake-native application ecosystem.
Download our “Snowflake Maturity Model” to learn how to bridge that gap.
