The Snowflake Data Marketplace: Easy and Innovative

Snowflake Data Marketplace, an easy and innovative way to share data!

Have you heard about the latest disruptor within the Data Cloud Market space today? The Snowflake Data Marketplace is taking on legacy ways of managing and governing datasets by simplifying the process. Think of what the cloud did to on-premise computing – this is what the Data Marketplace is doing to data management. An exciting time to be a “Data Person”, right?

You may be asking yourself what does this mean for my specific data needs? Let’s break it down into three simple questions about your current data platform: 

1. Has (or will) your organization ever needed to consume 3rd party data? Think geographic, economic, or social data sets that can provide insights into your customers behavior.    
2. Does your organization struggle with data silos, which limit the availability of data throughout the organization? Is all of your data trusted, governed, and in a state where it can be easily accessible for reporting & analytics. 
3. Has your organization ever considered monetizing or publishing its data assets for other organizations to consume? Most data-driven organizations view their data as one of their largest assets, so how can you leverage this asset to drive additional revenue streams?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, the Data Marketplace may be the solution you need to quickly identify and address your business challenges.  

Enter Snowflake. 

Within the Snowflake Data Marketplace, consumers can select data they are looking to integrate into their own ‘Snowflake Clusters’ by category (ex. Business, Finance, Government, Health etc.). Once an organization identifies said category, the latest source data is automatically accessible with a click of a button. This helps you focus on developing insights and improving your time to market, without having to clean, extract, or transform the data. Since the data sits in a Snowflake account, an organization can easily join with internal data sets to drive seamless business insights without taking on additional storage costs, saving organizations money and ensuring access to the most up-to-date information.   

With the newly added capabilities of the Snowflake Data Marketplace, current and future Snowflake customers can create and host their own data exchange. This allows consumers to break down data silos and share data in a highly governed and secure environment within, or even outside of, their organization.

Let’s look at an example.

A recent client case study surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic highlights how the Snowflake Data Marketplace alleviates headache and unnecessary measures. Our client was leveraging traditional ways of integrating various data sets to gather insights into how the pandemic was impacting their business. This required data be put through a series of cleansing steps, complex transformations, and integration processes before beginning the development of dashboards. In many cases, the data was outdated, causing departments to “short cut” processes and produce silos of fragmented data.

Sound familiar? This integration exercise tends to require many analysts and engineers working together to compile, analyze, and transform data sets into a format that can be used and trusted for their analytic needs. This coordination and labor take time and resources that many organizations, our client included, just don’t have. With the Snowflake Data Marketplace, organizations can leverage data sources like Starschema, a Covid-19 data set that curates and prepares analytics within any Snowflake account in a matter of seconds. Companies may also find a need to leverage additional datasets in analysis, such as weather data, which is easily accessed from WeatherSource on the Data Marketplace. This game changer enables organizations to focus on what truly matters to their business, without getting stuck in the weeds.   

What makes the Snowflake Data Marketplace a revolutionary platform?

It’s virtual and frictionless, therefore there is no need to copy or replicate existing data. The cost of trying to maintain, store, and use data in a fragmented environment is extremely high in comparison to data that is stored, shared, and retrieved from the Data Marketplace. Customers allocate data for sharing and grant permissions according to an individual need. Recipients can then process against data in place without ever gaining physical custody. This means data is always up to date, has zero latency, and augmentations by the providers are instantly available to the recipients. This in turn dramatically lowers cost of trying to store, maintain, and transform data in a 3rd party data lake. The Data Marketplace simplifies and reduces time to market, which will enable your organization to focus more on your own business and customer.  

So, what have we learned?

If your organization is suffering from legacy, time consuming data integration, take a closer look at the Snowflake Data Marketplace. It’s important to evolve and develop your data and analytics needs to ensure your business is optimizing and operating at the highest level possible.  

Authors 

Doug Kachelmuss

Principal, Data & Analytics – Strive Consulting, LLC

Feras Omran

Consultant, Data & Analytics – Strive Consulting, LLC

Looking for more information? Let’s Talk!  

Strive Consulting is a business and technology consulting firm, and proud partner of Snowflake, having direct experience with the Data Marketplace. Our team of experts can work hand-in-hand with you to determine if leveraging the Snowflake Data Marketplace is right for your organization.  

About Snowflake

Snowflake delivers the Data Cloud – a global network where thousands of organizations mobilize data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. Inside the Data Cloud, organizations unite their siloed data, easily discover and securely share governed data, and execute diverse analytic workloads. Join the Data Cloud. Snowflake.com.