As a Snowflake Select Partner, we invite you to learn about its features, capabilities and see the impact it can bring to your business. Snowflake is a fully managed Data Cloud that brings together comprehensive functionality supporting data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, data science, data application development, and securely sharing and consuming shared data.
Being a single-platform solution with a wide variety of use cases, Snowflake’s feature set is necessarily extensive. For the purposes of this article, we are examining the three main layers which form the basis of the solution, what is contained within each one, and the key benefits which each layer brings to the solution as a whole.
Layer 1: Elastic Performance Engine
At the heart of Snowflake is a multi-purpose engine powering a variety of tasks, including analytics, applications and interactions, feature engineering, and complex data pipelines.
Rather than using separate engines for different task silos, the Snowflake approach allows for a much more simplified architecture, which significantly lowers the maintenance, testing, and integration overheads associated with multi-part solutions.
It means that scaling can be done centrally and near-instantly, with no functional upper limit on the number of users or workloads, and bidirectionally, meaning no unnecessary spending on unused infrastructure.
Snowflake is also developer-friendly, supporting SQL natively and including its own “Snowpark” developer framework which enables Java and Scala access. Native pushdown integrations are also available to developers, allowing them to seamlessly integrate their preferred external tools with the platform.
Layer 2: Intelligent Infrastructure
As an entirely cloud-based solution, Snowflake employs the latest automations to optimize data management and resource allocation. The platform aims to reduce reliance on manual administration and configuration of the underlying infrastructure, instead, automating the management of key parameters for the most efficient outcome.
This maximizes both the reliability and availability of the platform, with automatic data replication cross-region or cross-cloud, even in complex configurations, offering substantial reductions in recovery time.
The role of automation isn’t limited to monitoring and duplicating data, however. The intelligent infrastructure is able to make real-time adjustments in the background, responding to usage and demand patterns to improve the speed of performance and efficiency of storage without manual action.
The result is a highly cost-effective solution that enables true rightsizing of resource usage and delivers maximal return on investment.
Layer 3: Data management
The combination of intelligent infrastructure and an integrated and elastic performance engine means that Snowflake allows users to go beyond merely managing data to harness its full potential. Organizations implementing Snowflake have the tools they need to automatically optimize the security, availability, and resiliency of their datasets.
Snowgrid, part of Snowflake, allows organizations to easily and conveniently share data across business functions, so that teams, departments, partners and customers are no longer operating in separate silos. As all parties are using a single copy of the data, there are fewer administrative overheads in terms of version management, access control, and data transfer.
The Snowflake Data Marketplace adds greater depth, giving users access to a wealth of third-party data sets which can be used to develop and enrich insights, improve reporting, and benchmark operations.
From a security point of view, Snowflake benefits from sophisticated governance controls and comprehensive policies which ensure regulatory compliance even when data is shared across functions, regions, or locations.
The highest security Snowflake deployments have achieved Federal Risk & Authorization Management Program Authorization to Operate at the Moderate level, and support SOC 2 Type 2, PCI DSS, and HIPAA compliance.
The outcome is greater operational efficiency, a significant reduction in risk, and simplified compliance at a regulatory, legal and governmental level.
Getting started with Snowflake
If you’d like to learn more about how Snowflake could revolutionize data management within your organization, get in touch to speak with one of our expert advisers.