Informatica and Snowflake: Successful Digital Transformation at Enterprise Scale

More and more aspects of life and work are becoming digitized. The world has awakened to the value of the massive amounts of data that this new reality generates. Data is arguably the most critical asset across an organization—and companies that leverage it to increase revenue, reduce costs, and gain competitive advantage are the best positioned to not only survive the current crisis, but thrive and dominate their markets in the coming years.

At the same time, the world of data management has undergone a profound transformation. The emergence of public cloud services has unshackled data from systems designed with a scarcity of resources in mind to those with essentially limitless capacity for storage and processing. This trend has happened in parallel with the diversification of analytics. Most employees are now expected to be able to perform some level of data-driven analysis, and data can be used not just to report on the past, but to predict the future with accuracy as well.

In this whirlwind of change, companies will have to take a new approach, where speed and agility in their analytics stack—as well as in the business processes used to govern and manage that stack—are of the utmost importance. The ability to make faster, better decisions and control costs for the underlying analytics will be fundamental. Finally, companies need to provide a great customer experience to both internal and external consumers of the data in order for them to increase their productivity and speed time to insight.

Addressing Your Most Demanding Data Challenges

Companies are looking to drive agility and maximize the potential of their analytics initiatives by building new systems or modernizing and consolidating existing on-premises systems with Snowflake’s cloud data platform. Snowflake, a strategic partner for Informatica, has tackled these challenges head-on. With Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS), an AI-powered, multi-cloud integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS), and Snowflake’s scalable, fully elastic modern cloud data platform (which combines the structure of a cloud data warehouse with the flexibility of a data lake), you gain a unified cloud data architecture that is built for the future, runs on every cloud, and works with any data—at scale, to deliver data-driven insights.

By pairing Informatica’s intelligent, automated data management capabilities with the Snowflake Cloud Data Platform, you can achieve the performance, scalability, and concurrency required to address your most demanding cloud analytics and data-related challenges. The combination brings together the best characteristics of on-premises enterprise data warehouses (EDWs), the advantages of cloud, and the lessons learned from the world of big data into a single platform. You can leverage cloud storage and ephemeral compute in a platform where a single physical copy of the data can support many workloads. This also allows you to provide secure and governed data access to all consumer groups, internal or external, eliminating data silos.

Building faster data pipelines into Snowflake

The increasing volume and variety of data mean that huge amounts of information need to be assessed, curated, and protected so that anyone—business or IT—or any system can use it. With IICS, you can more effectively build your data pipelines into Snowflake. By leveraging Informatica's metadata-driven, intelligent data integration, you can build out a robust data infrastructure centered on Snowflake, faster.

Informatica complements the Snowflake Cloud Data Platform with intelligent data governance. Automated with AI and machine learning, it scales to handle even the largest data sets and is intelligent in more than name only, offering:

• Data quality to ensure that all consumers have access to trusted data
• Data privacy to reduce risk and ensure the protection of sensitive data such as PII, etc.
• Data cataloging to enable you to easily discover data and maintain data lineage
• Automated stewardship capabilities that reduce the number of review and management tasks assigned to data stewards

Informatica and Snowflake also provide robust security solutions at the access, authentication, application, data, and infrastructure levels, while at the same time ensuring data privacy and restricting access to source data.

Driving Data Transformation

Together, Snowflake and Informatica have helped companies take control of their data to drive transformation. By centralizing all their operational and analytical workloads on Snowflake, Laureate Education, an international network of for-profit universities, was able to reduce the time to insights from hours to minutes while establishing a single copy of trusted data for consumers in the organization and reducing the costs associated with their stack.

Other customers have modernized their on-premises EDWs and data lakes in a matter of months. For example, a Fortune 100 customer was struggling with their on-premises data warehouse that could not meet the high demand for analytics. They needed to move to a cloud data warehouse to help scale quickly. They leveraged Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (Cloud Mass Ingestion) to ingest and migrate data from across their entire platform into Snowflake’s self-service, scalable data warehouse. Within a few weeks, they had moved upwards of 50TB of data into Snowflake in production and are rapidly moving toward using Snowflake as the bedrock of their new data-centered strategy.

Next Steps

Learn more about modernizing analytics with Informatica’s intelligent, AI-powered data management and Snowflake’s Cloud Data Platform.