Snowflake Data Sharing Demystified
US$3 Trillion. That’s the potential annual economic value of data sharing across organizations and industries, according to McKinsey & Company and the World Economic Forum. That sounds impressive, because it is. And there’s also the possibility that it sounds vague.
So let’s bring some clarity to data sharing.
What is Data Sharing?
Data sharing between organizations, whether they are connected through a business relationship or purely by chance, gives each side the ability to use each other’s data within a legal and governance framework. For some companies this involves purchasing data from a commercial provider to combine it with their own data, arriving at new insights that help drive decision making.
For other businesses data sharing provides the opportunity to work more closely with their suppliers and business partners, opening doors into new ventures and product offerings.
Traditional data sharing
Traditionally, data sharing has involved moving data. This is done through FTP, API calls, email attachments, and yes, even USB drives, CDs and DVDs. And more often than not, this method for sharing data is still very prevalent today. But it’s neither effective, nor efficient. And it certainly isn’t as secure as many users like to think. Once the data is moved, it’s out of your control. And moving data from A to B (and beyond) always introduces a delay into the process — the data is never as fresh as live data.
A future-proof approach
A more sustainable approach, and one that builds on automation, secure and governed access with flexible controls, is data sharing through the Data Cloud. The Data Cloud is powered by Snowflake’s platform that enables frictionless sharing of data in a highly governed way for companies internally and externally. All without moving data.
How does Data Sharing work in the Data Cloud?
Organizations have a number of choices for how they want to structure their data sharing capabilities. Those who simply want to share data with one other entity can establish a Direct Share with another organization in Snowflake. If their counterpart is not a Snowflake customer, the data provider can use a Reader Account to share data with the other organization.
A company that wants to publish its data in a single place and centrally govern access to that data by internal and external parties, can set up a Data Exchange where data becomes discoverable and accessible across business units and business partners. This allows controlled access to the data all in one place and the ‘host’ can easily monitor the usage of each dataset and give others permission to publish data, while also driving true collaboration around data.
Finally, organizations that want to monetize their data and provide access to a broad audience, can become data providers on the Data Marketplace and offer their data as a commercial product or free of charge. Datasets on the Data Marketplace can be discovered by anyone and help companies to use third-party data in their analyses with minimum effort and maximum efficiency.
Who actually does it?
In short: tonnes of organizations and people are sharing data this way and are benefiting from it. Let’s see how this benefits some of them in particular by looking at their use cases and how these organizations have applied Data Sharing for the benefit of their business.
Atheon Analytics: Using Snowflake Secure Data Sharing to Grow Revenue with New Products
Atheon Analytics provides UK supermarkets and their suppliers with professional services, advice and analytical services to help them improve their offerings to customers and optimise their supply chain.
They saw an opportunity in a market where data from retailers was cumbersome to manage for suppliers and had often become outdated by the time they received it. To reduce this effort and therefore the barriers to managing, analysing and making use of the data, Atheon Analytics created SKUtrak, a solution where data is collected, stored and transformed and where suppliers could access daily updates to support their decision making.
Suppliers still wanted more, however, and wanted direct access to the data so they could query and analyse it on their own.
Atheon Analytics, in response, created SKUtrak DataShare. Their customers, who also use Snowflake, can directly access data in real-time, running queries and analyses on the latest data with powerful performance to support their business.
Data sharing capabilities in Snowflake have created this unique opportunity not just for Atheon Analytics to create a new product offering, but also for their customers to access critical data faster and more efficiently than ever before.
Read more about Atheon’s story here.
Petco Modernizes its Data Environment for Scalable Retail Analytics with Snowflake
Petco is a US based retailer selling pet products and services and they have made it their mission to improve the lives of pets, pet parents and Petco partners. Across over 1500 physical locations, Petco produces large amounts of transactional data that need to be ingested and analysed centrally to better understand business performance and identify opportunities for improvement.
Petco’s biggest challenge was the inability of their legacy system to scale sufficiently to support their evolving analytics needs and demands. Having their system creak and choke under the pressure come Monday mornings was not unusual and did not present a way to run their business effectively.
Thanks to Snowflake’s architecture, Petco were able to remove resource constraints immediately, giving people the ability to run reports and analyses, no matter what time of the day or day of the week it was. Petco use data sharing capabilities in Snowflake to accelerate data sharing internally and to access third party datasets from the Data Marketplace.
As a result of their Snowflake implementation, Petco were able to influence millions of dollars of revenue growth, as they developed better, deeper insights and a true 360° of their customers, helping them to optimise promotions and campaigns to serve the needs of pets and pet owners.
Find out more in this article.
How can Data Sharing benefit you and your business?
Data sharing holds a number of opportunities and the capabilities Snowflake offers are one of the main reasons why I decided to join the company earlier this year. I personally see an immense value in breaking down data silos internally to an organisation and to remove the barriers that still exist between companies and non-profits that want to share data effectively, securely and in an effort to develop better products, services and solutions.
I have worked with many organisations in the past who needed and wanted to use data made available by others but it all fell down due to the process. Data sharing was cumbersome, complicated, time consuming and downright frustrating. It involved building complex workflows to move, ingest and transform data, day after day, week after week. Effort on both sides of the equation — and it was never easy.
What I love about Snowflake’s data sharing capabilities
What is so radically different about data sharing in Snowflake is that data doesn’t move. It stays wherever it lives and data providers simply give access to those who need it. When this happens inside an organisation, it speeds up the analytical process and allows more focus on working with the data, instead of managing and wrangling it. It also helps to bring people and departments closer together as they work on data collaboratively and have more opportunities to provide help to each other.
Sharing data externally can also strengthen connections to other organisations and can go far beyond that, offering the chance to monetise your data and develop a new product or business unit around it. Having the ability to access commercial and free third party data means any organisation can include major external factors into their analysis of customer data, preferences and buying behaviours. Being able to account for the impact of the COVID pandemic, factors like the weather, transportation, population data and demographics, and many more means that businesses can fine-tune their analytics and enhance their insights far beyond what was available to them so far.
Data sharing opportunities for the non-profit sector
I am also confident that effective data sharing will be transformational for the non-profit sector where resources are often limited and data analysts and data scientists often work in small teams or even on their own. This makes it difficult to take on new projects such as introducing external — and much needed! — data into their analyses. When data sharing is easy, secure and fast, without the unnecessary administrative burden that often accompanied it in the past, non-profit organisations can scale their analytics more quickly even within the limitations of the resources available to them. Enabling data sharing between non-profits across the world can accelerate the progress that is made on issues impacting the poorest and most vulnerable people and help those communities benefit from solutions faster, be it in maternal healthcare, education, or mitigating the effects of climate change.
I encourage you to embrace these benefits for yourself and your organisation. Feel free to get in touch and to find out more on our website.
