Combining Atlan, Snowflake, and Sigma to Democratize Entry to Nicely-governed Information
At a Look
- North, a number one funds resolution supplier processing over $100 billion in annual transactions, aimed to enhance knowledge discovery and governance atop their Snowflake- and Sigma-powered fashionable knowledge stack
- Adopting Atlan as their lively metadata platform, North has since achieved end-to-end visibility of 225,000 knowledge belongings, securing delicate knowledge, and growing adoption of self-service analytics
- In lower than a 12 months, their crew is projecting $1.4mm in annual effectivity beneficial properties and a 200% development in Sigma adoption whereas realizing a 700% improve in tagged Snowflake belongings which has contributed to mitigating tens of millions of {dollars} in danger
For over 30 years, North has established itself as a number one funds resolution supplier, now processing over $100 billion in transactions yearly. With a various portfolio of over 20 manufacturers and subsidiaries, they help a broad vary of cost wants, supporting brick-and-mortar and on-line shops via cost gateways, cellular options, and extra. Dedicated to serving industries that span eating places to authorities entities, North goals to be the best end-to-end funds supplier to do enterprise with.
With an enormous knowledge property comprising 225,000 belongings, totaling 41 terabytes on Snowflake, the duty of managing and governing North’s knowledge belongs to Daniel Dowdy, Vice President of Information Analytics & Governance, serving for 13 years on the firm. Becoming a member of Atlan at Snowflake Summit 2024, Daniel shared his crew’s journey, constructing and governing a contemporary knowledge stack that helps each inner knowledge shoppers and their flagship merchandise.
What do 20 subsidiaries and types, and 100,000+ retailers, imply for our crew? It means we’ve got quite a lot of knowledge. We use that knowledge to help a few of our hottest merchandise.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
North’s flagship choices, Payanywhere and Funds Hub, equip retailers with something from {hardware} and software program, to safe on-line portals, simplifying the complexities of funds for retailers.
Funds Hub, a complete funds and operations platform, serves as a command middle for all the things from transaction monitoring and reporting to stock administration and fraud safety. To ship important, transaction-level reporting to their clients, North depends on Snowflake.
“We make the most of Snowflake for each of those on the backend to supply close to real-time reporting and transaction-level reporting to our clients,” Daniel shared. “With out Snowflake, this simply wouldn’t be attainable.”
Earlier than Snowflake, Information Silos
Earlier than Snowflake, North struggled with unchecked and unclear knowledge. Easy duties like pulling uncooked knowledge or producing studies might take days and even weeks, hindered by ETL bottlenecks and knowledge silos scattered throughout a number of servers and databases, or Excel information circulated throughout the group.
As soon as a file goes out, that knowledge is already stale. To not point out that after that file leaves you, customers can then modify it and make their very own supply of reality. So, you’re fighting a number of sources of the reality.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
The dearth of a single supply of reality difficult efforts to drive belief in North’s knowledge, and with out clear lineage and governance, controlling that knowledge as soon as it left their palms proved troublesome.
After Snowflake + Sigma, Correct, Actual-time Information
In 2019, North adopted Snowflake as their enterprise knowledge lake, considerably enhancing their knowledge science, analytics, and reporting capabilities. By shifting from outdated batch processing to real-time CDC options, their crew traded cumbersome ETL workflows and embraced the effectivity of contemporary ELT processes.
“We went from a ‘Information Desert,’ the place retrieving data took days, to an oasis the place knowledge was obtainable in actual time, and we might question it in seconds,” stated Daniel.
Whereas Snowflake represented a major leap ahead within the availability and reliability of information, Daniel’s crew have been nonetheless answerable for fielding easy requests for knowledge entry. To cut back this workload, and to make knowledge much more accessible to a rising variety of shoppers, their crew launched Sigma, a enterprise intelligence software that empowers customers to independently entry, analyze, and visualize knowledge, providing essential data in a self-service method.
With its acquainted, Excel-like interface, enterprise customers rapidly embraced Sigma, leading to a skyrocketing adoption charge, with annual consumer development now exceeding 200%.
Starting with 10 customers in 2019, we now have over 350 customers in Sigma, with an annual development charge of greater than 200% year-over-year. Now, Sigma is our self-service analytics platform, and it’s taken quite a lot of burden off our knowledge crew.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
North has since engineered a contemporary knowledge stack, organising strong pipelines that seamlessly ingest and replicate knowledge from numerous sources like Oracle, MySQL, Salesforce, and S3. This wealth of information is then channeled into highly effective instruments comparable to Qlik, Snowpipe, and Kafka, all converging inside Snowflake.
As the amount and number of knowledge grew, so did the demand for entry, shifting the problem from mere knowledge accessibility to the extra advanced points of information governance and discovery.
“What grew to become the issue was the best way to discover the information, and the best way to govern it properly,” Daniel shared. “Atlan grew to become the central level addressing all of those issues.”
Unlocking Snowflake and Sigma with Atlan
Connecting to over 225,000 knowledge belongings inside Snowflake and Sigma took simply hours with Atlan, driving unprecedented visibility on a big scale.
“After partnering with Atlan, it took most likely a few hours earlier than we have been built-in with Snowflake and Sigma, connecting to over 225,000 belongings. We’re so pleased with the outcomes,” Daniel shared.
This near-instant connection remodeled knowledge discovery at North, as soon as a chaotic expertise of leaping via a number of silos, abruptly making it easy to navigate and perceive their knowledge property.
Atlan began getting us this instant worth via knowledge discovery. The way in which I maintain fascinated about it was the early days of the web. You had entry to this huge quantity of data, nevertheless it was actually laborious to search out. Then, search engines like google and yahoo made it straightforward to run a search and discover related content material. For us, Atlan grew to become Google for Information.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
Transferring past easy knowledge discovery, Daniel’s crew launched knowledge glossaries, definitions, and complete phrases, enabling deeper dives into knowledge, and using lineage to know upstream and downstream dependencies with ease.
With this priceless context unlocked, their subsequent step was to ship it on to enterprise customers, who primarily devour knowledge inside the Sigma, with out switching to different instruments.
“That’s the place Atlan’s Chrome Extension grew to become a game-changer,” Daniel shared.
Atlan’s Chrome Extension remodeled knowledge consumption inside Sigma. With context about their knowledge belongings—dashboard descriptions, knowledge definitions, tags, lineage, notifications, and upstream high quality alerts—now obtainable immediately in Sigma, customers now not needed to bounce between instruments to perform their duties.
Accessible in a sidebar, Atlan’s Chrome Extension made this data immediately accessible, with out coaching or change administration.
“The initiative required no coaching,” Daniel defined. “As a result of it’s a sidebar and intuitively reveals this data, we’d simply add it, then customers have been mechanically up and working, enhancing their effectivity, and instantly seeing the profit.”
Problem Decision for Engineers and Customers, Alike
With context about their knowledge belongings made obtainable in Sigma, Daniel and his crew started work to enhance the method of troubleshooting and speaking points associated to those belongings. Upon receiving a ticket, North’s engineering crew as soon as spent vital time looking out via Sigma to determine the belongings referenced within the request. And not using a direct hyperlink between tickets and these belongings, decision would typically be delayed, and work could be duplicated.
“It was actually inefficient,” Daniel shared. “Generally even the identical engineers could be engaged on the identical mission, and so they didn’t even understand it as a result of a number of tickets have been submitted by a number of folks.”
By integrating the Atlan Chrome Extension with Jira and Slack, North’s knowledge shoppers might elevate points immediately of their software of selection, with a hyperlink to particular belongings included mechanically, permitting Information Engineers to know when and the place points occurred.
For knowledge shoppers in Sigma, this integration supplied a complete historical past of all Jira tickets and Slack conversations referring to particular knowledge belongings, and for engineers, a method of stopping duplicate tickets or a number of engineers engaged on the identical subject, and time financial savings by higher understanding comparable, previous points.
Eliminating duplicate work, or eliminating your engineers engaged on the identical mission with out understanding about it? These effectivity beneficial properties are enormous, and the financial savings add up actually rapidly.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
Introducing Snowflake Dynamic Information Masking
As a funds resolution supplier, North handles huge quantities of delicate monetary knowledge. Whereas enhancements in knowledge discovery and enrichment are essential, Daniel’s crew realized the worth of those enhancements could be restricted to a small variety of trusted customers with out strong knowledge governance and documentation securing these belongings.
To safe delicate knowledge and implement stringent entry insurance policies, North’s knowledge crew selected to make the most of Dynamic Information Masking with Snowflake, providing complete column-level masking for delicate knowledge, and policy-based management for customers.
With the intention to make the most of Dynamic Information Masking, Daniel and his crew started the method of figuring out particular knowledge belongings that these insurance policies would apply to. Given the size and complexity of their knowledge panorama, they acknowledged {that a} granular, asset-by-asset strategy could be not solely time-consuming, however doubtlessly error-prone. Trying to find a method to determine and safe these belongings programmatically, Daniel turned to Atlan.
“How do you discover and tag hundreds of belongings? You don’t Google it, you Atlan it. It’s actually easy,” Daniel defined.
Governing Hundreds of Belongings, on the Click on of a Button
Somewhat than painstakingly finding these belongings, then tagging them one-by-one, their crew utilized Atlan Playbooks, rules-based bulk automations that would determine hundreds of belongings based mostly on chosen standards, then mechanically apply actions, comparable to including chosen tags and insurance policies.
By the point I added a filter, Atlan scanned our 225,000 belongings and virtually instantly discovered 45 matches. As I modified the filters so as to add new ones, it always up to date to indicate me what number of belongings meet that standards. Hours of guide analysis and testing, earlier than Atlan, was transformed into a pair seconds.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
Shortly figuring out hundreds of belongings to better-secure, Daniel’s crew used Playbooks to construct workflows that may mechanically apply the proper tag to the proper asset, then propagate that tag upstream, on the click on of a button. Then, with Atlan’s Two-way Tag Sync, these tags would function the inspiration for Dynamic Information Masking at North, mechanically making use of masking insurance policies based mostly on how and from whom knowledge was queried.
By combining Atlan Playbooks, Two-way Tag Sync, and Automated Lineage with Snowflake Dynamic Information Masking, North efficiently ruled hundreds of information belongings in file time with a programmatic strategy, avoiding the painstaking work of figuring out, tagging, and recording insurance policies one-by-one throughout a 225,000-asset panorama.
With out Atlan tracing upstream and downstream, serving to us perceive potential publicity and implement insurance policies, this course of would have been difficult and really guide. However with Atlan, you can’t solely hint knowledge lineage and set up the complexity, however you possibly can see reputation and utilization metrics that assist prioritize the place efforts are wanted probably the most, or the place the largest impression might be made.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
By means of this programmatic strategy, Daniel’s crew affected a 700% improve in tagged belongings, considerably enhancing their safety and compliance, and paving the way in which for a major improve within the variety of their colleagues trusted to make use of knowledge.
“We’ve used Atlan to spice up the velocity and accuracy of our asset tagging by greater than 700% since implementation,” Daniel shared. “With the flexibility to find knowledge sooner, apply tags, and reverse sync that knowledge again into Snowflake, we added greater than 2,000 governance belongings in beneath a 12 months. That’s simply the tip of the iceberg.”
Hundreds of thousands in Worth, in Months
In lower than one 12 months of being outfitted with Atlan, Daniel and his crew remodeled the way in which North makes use of and governs its knowledge, unlocking the potential for tens of millions in worth via effectivity beneficial properties, value reductions, and enhanced danger mitigation.
By thoughtfully converging essential context about Snowflake and Sigma right into a user-friendly data base in Atlan, North’s technical and enterprise customers are projecting financial savings of $1.4 million per 12 months in effort via accelerated knowledge discovery and lowered effort understanding lineage.
“That’s $1.4 million of duplicate work, guide and tedious analysis. That’s time we will now spend on altering issues, versus attempting to navigate knowledge prefer it’s the web in 1997,” Daniel shared.
And with built-in insights in Atlan, close to–immediately figuring out pointless spend of their Snowflake surroundings, Daniel and his crew estimate an annual value financial savings of greater than $20,000 by deprecating greater than 10,000 idle belongings and inefficient queries.
“That financial savings was mainly handed to us on a silver platter with no additional work,” Daniel remarked.
Past value financial savings and effectivity beneficial properties, and existential to an organization that processes delicate monetary knowledge, lies vital danger mitigation. By growing their tagged belongings by 700%, rapidly and in bulk, North’s governance and safety improved virtually in a single day, to the tune of tens of millions of {dollars} in lowered danger.
We’ve been in a position to cut back our danger and publicity by tens of millions and tens of millions of {dollars}.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
A 200% Improve in Self-service Analytics, with Room to Develop
Whereas these enhancements are spectacular, whether or not in knowledge discovery, with context about their knowledge belongings supporting a 200% year-over-year improve in self-service analytics adoption, or in Information Governance, driving tens of millions in danger mitigation, it’s the mixture of those packages that’s set to remodel the way in which North makes use of knowledge.
By affecting a leap ahead in the way in which that North manages entry management and ensures safety throughout an enormous knowledge property, the way in which Daniel’s crew defines a trusted consumer of information is evolving and increasing considerably.
“Information Governance gave us the boldness to soundly and securely share extra knowledge in Sigma,” Daniel defined.Now assured that probably the most delicate knowledge is safe, appropriately tagged, and ruled by the proper entry coverage, North can confidently provide knowledge and self-service analytics capabilities to extra enterprise customers than ever earlier than, enhancing the already vital worth they’ve yielded from combining Atlan, Snowflake, and Sigma.
We have been in a state of near-paralysis attempting to manually decide who ought to see what. Using a mixture of improved governance insurance policies, tags, and dynamic knowledge masking, we have been ready to make use of knowledge with confidence. Because of the enhanced consumer expertise, mixed with the elevated knowledge availability, we anticipate to proceed or exceed our self-service surroundings development charges.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
Mere years after adopting Snowflake as the inspiration of their Trendy Information Stack, and fewer than a 12 months after adopting Atlan, North’s knowledge property has remodeled from, as Daniel described, a “Information Desert” into an “Oasis.”
“For the reason that knowledge by no means leaves our umbrella, there’s no extra flat information which can be shared,” Daniel defined. “There’s no extra a number of variations of the reality, and our knowledge has a degree of confidence, leading to sooner and extra knowledgeable selections.”
Regardless of the unbelievable accomplishments of North’s knowledge crew, constructing self-service analytics and Information Governance capabilities from scratch in file time, Daniel believes there’s nonetheless a lot extra to perform.
Within the months and years to come back, their knowledge crew is keen to make use of Atlan AI to simplify advanced queries into pure language, and speed up the enrichment of their knowledge belongings. And by supporting a rising variety of Information Stewards to independently share and doc data, a extra knowledgeable and empowered neighborhood of enterprise customers is rising.
Reflecting on their journey with Atlan, Daniel emphasised that past the proper expertise, crew, and technique lies a vital aspect: The correct partnership.
One of the crucial essential issues about Atlan has been the folks. They’re knowledge those that have labored within the business, perceive what you’re going via, and perceive what you’re speaking about from the second you begin the dialog.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
Photograph by Jonas Leupe on Unsplash