Snowflake's Modern Platform Solves Data Challenges


By Mike Sargo

Chief Data and Analytics Officer and Co-Founder of Data Ideology  

There's a common theme with organizations that have built legacy data warehouses that have slowly grown out of control. 

Many organizations end up with a decentralized data architecture. This is the classic various data marts, or what some call a departmental data warehouse approach. In this environment, the business users are extracting the data from various governed and non-governed data sources, manipulating the data, and loading their data warehouse for their department's usage. 

This approach has resulted in several challenges in delivering fast, accurate data with a single version of the truth.

Simplicity: Business analysts are required to collect and manipulate data. 

Efficiency: More resources are deployed gathering data than analyzing data.  

Flexibility: Data warehouse and reports are inflexible, requiring coding for customizations. 

Streamline: Difficulty and timeliness of consistent and accurate information. 

Accuracy: Gut feel vs. fact-based decisions - changing the ways we manage performance.  

One version of the Truth (Departmental DW Approach) 

  • Data in local terms and silos of decision making 
  • Data views and terms are inconstant across the business - subjective interpretation of questionable data 
  • Spreadmarts prevail and disparate data marts or data warehouses 
  • Data quality is locally managed, and there is no data ownership 

Alignment: BI or analytics projects (Re-Usability and Standardization)

Increased Financial Performance 

Risk: Compliance, Preserving Margins 

 Many organizations have designed and architected the current legacy data warehouse years ago, which was the appropriate approach at the time, however as these organizations grow over that same period, the data warehouse has followed the traditional path. Legacy Data Warehouses were never designed to handle the current volume and velocity of data that modern business users now require.

Current technology has enabled a new approach that can help resolve many of these ongoing challenges. 

Building a Modern Data Platform with Snowflake can alleviate many of the current organizational challenges by delivering a solution that is: 

Scalable: Data solutions to support the organization's growth 

Flexible: Enables the business to access data to extract value easily 

Fast and Efficient: Empower more people and answer more questions quickly 

 Modernizing your legacy data warehouse leveraging the Snowflake cloud data platform can unlock your organization's analytical capabilities. The snowflake data platform built from the ground up to leverage the capabilities of the cloud, which provides an organization the ability to store all data in a centralized platform, support all users throughout the organizations, pay only for what you use, and with near-zero management, so your team can focus on delivering value to your business users.

Our customers who are leveraging the Snowflake Cloud Data Platform are seeing a renewed focus and investment to integrate data across their organization. The Snowflake modern data platform, combined with a modern approach, will be critical to support the data-driven organization of the future. Success will lead to developing the business user data experience and data foundation that future initiatives can build upon further maturing the organization's data & analytics capabilities. 

Written by Mike Sargo
Mike Sargo is Chief Data and Analytics Officer and Co-Founder of Data Ideology with over 18 years of experience leading, architecting, implementing, and delivering enterprise analytics, business intelligence, and enterprise data management solutions.

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