The future of cloud modernisation

The alliance between Deloitte, the market leader in analytics integration, and Snowflake, a disruptive cloud data platform, will enable organisations to transform and modernise their business through the cloud and to harvest the power of their data. Working together, Deloitte and Snowflake can help your organisation to embark on a cloud modernisation journey.

Snowflake, a cloud data platform provider, doubled its value the day it went public, making it one of the largest companies to do so. Its stunning growth in a disrupted market and key differentiating features appear to have convinced that Snowflake can take on the cloud giants. Snowflake raised more than $3 billion, the most ever for a software company.

Cloud disrupts data warehousing with scalability, flexibility and simplicity

Nowadays, data is recognised as a competitive asset for many businesses. The need for effective, scalable and performant data solutions is therefore more tangible than ever. Those requirements are shedding light on some challenges that legacy data platforms are still facing:

• Translating the company’s transformation in its legacy data platform can be troublesome, making it difficult to adapt to fast-paced and innovative environments. 
• Increasing quickly the capabilities of an on-premise legacy system requires accurate planning while in the cloud, computing power and storage are quickly and easily accessible.
• Data usage varies a lot while infrastructures are a constant source of costs.

Those combined elements create a data warehousing market ripe for disruption: cloud data platforms are bringing a more tailored, highly flexible and scalable solution, convincing many companies to make the switch. The traction for cloud enabled data solutions tremendously increases, and this, for big as well as for traditional data.

Cloud providers (AWS, Google Cloud Services, Microsoft Azure,…) are positioned to answer this demand. They allow users to easily and quickly develop modern data platforms without the need for cumbersome maintenance, using their elastic infrastructures to adapt to the user’s demand while offering a usage based cost system. Surfing on those deeply rooted market trends, Snowflake is growing increasingly fast, becoming an important cloud player.

With cloud solutions, every company can harvest the power of big data

Amazon Web Service, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform are also providing solutions for cloud data warehousing. However, Snowflake is built on top of their data storage solutions, providing the same services regardless of the storage provider. This high portability gives its customer many options, allowing for a seamless integration with solutions from the different cloud providers.

Snowflake also distinguishes itself with a unique architecture and differentiating features:

• Computing power and storage are paid separately, allowing the user to easily manage its costs and resources on a pay-as-you-use basis. Moreover, the different workloads are isolated so that different activities do not interfere with each other, ensuring velocity.
• Its data lake infrastructure allows for the bulk load of a variety of structured and semi-structured data as well as real-time data feeds with high velocity such as Kafka data ingestions.
• Its automated maintenance features ease the daily work and its more user-friendly approach ensures minimal administration needs.
• Data exchange within the Snowflake network is easy and secured. Organizations are therefore able to collaborate with their business partners via governed and secured data sharing in real time.

Improving the customer experience with cloud

Recently, Deloitte supported a key player in the insurance industry become more customer centric and to offer more digital services. This organization had troubles doing so through their legacy data platform. In less than six months, Deloitte helped them to lift and shift their data infrastructure to the cloud using the Snowflake services.

The organization now has access to a limitless scalable data platform. It benefits from significantly better computing performance and is able to launch machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions. One year after having started the project, the organization is realizing a positive return on investment, making it a very successful business case.

Authors: Christophe Hallard, Magali Thésias & Félix Carati