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 information discovery and governance atop their Snowflake- and Sigma-powered trendy information stack
- Adopting Atlan as their lively metadata platform, North has since achieved end-to-end visibility of 225,000 information property, securing delicate information, and rising adoption of self-service analytics
- In lower than a 12 months, their staff is projecting $1.4mm in annual effectivity good points and a 200% progress in Sigma adoption whereas realizing a 700% improve in tagged Snowflake property which has contributed to mitigating hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in threat
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 fee wants, supporting brick-and-mortar and on-line shops by means of fee gateways, cell 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 information property comprising 225,000 property, totaling 41 terabytes on Snowflake, the duty of managing and governing North’s information 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 staff’s journey, constructing and governing a contemporary information stack that helps each inside information shoppers and their flagship merchandise.
What do 20 subsidiaries and types, and 100,000+ retailers, imply for our staff? It means now we have a whole lot of information. We use that information 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 every part from transaction monitoring and reporting to stock administration and fraud safety. To ship essential, 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 information. Easy duties like pulling uncooked information or producing experiences may take days and even weeks, hindered by ETL bottlenecks and information silos scattered throughout a number of servers and databases, or Excel recordsdata circulated throughout the group.
As soon as a file goes out, that information is already stale. To not point out that when 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 sophisticated efforts to drive belief in North’s information, and with out clear lineage and governance, controlling that information as soon as it left their fingers proved troublesome.
After Snowflake + Sigma, Correct, Actual-time Information
In 2019, North adopted Snowflake as their enterprise information lake, considerably enhancing their information science, analytics, and reporting capabilities. By shifting from outdated batch processing to real-time CDC options, their staff traded cumbersome ETL workflows and embraced the effectivity of recent ELT processes.
“We went from a ‘Information Desert,’ the place retrieving data took days, to an oasis the place information was obtainable in actual time, and we may question it in seconds,” stated Daniel.
Whereas Snowflake represented a big leap ahead within the availability and reliability of knowledge, Daniel’s staff have been nonetheless chargeable for fielding easy requests for information entry. To scale back this workload, and to make information much more accessible to a rising variety of shoppers, their staff launched Sigma, a enterprise intelligence instrument that empowers customers to independently entry, analyze, and visualize information, providing essential data in a self-service method.
With its acquainted, Excel-like interface, enterprise customers rapidly embraced Sigma, leading to a skyrocketing adoption fee, with annual consumer progress now exceeding 200%.
Starting with 10 customers in 2019, we now have over 350 customers in Sigma, with an annual progress fee of greater than 200% year-over-year. Now, Sigma is our self-service analytics platform, and it’s taken a whole lot of burden off our information staff.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
North has since engineered a contemporary information stack, organising sturdy pipelines that seamlessly ingest and replicate information from various sources like Oracle, MySQL, Salesforce, and S3. This wealth of knowledge is then channeled into highly effective instruments corresponding to Qlik, Snowpipe, and Kafka, all converging inside Snowflake.
As the amount and number of information grew, so did the demand for entry, shifting the problem from mere information accessibility to the extra advanced points of knowledge governance and discovery.
“What turned the issue was the way to discover the information, and the way to govern it nicely,” Daniel shared. “Atlan turned the central level addressing all of those issues.”
Unlocking Snowflake and Sigma with Atlan
Connecting to over 225,000 information property inside Snowflake and Sigma took simply hours with Atlan, driving unprecedented visibility on a big scale.
“After partnering with Atlan, it took in all probability a few hours earlier than we have been built-in with Snowflake and Sigma, connecting to over 225,000 property. We’re so pleased with the outcomes,” Daniel shared.
This near-instant connection reworked information discovery at North, as soon as a chaotic expertise of leaping by means of a number of silos, abruptly making it easy to navigate and perceive their information property.
Atlan began getting us this rapid worth by means of information discovery. The best way I maintain fascinated by it was the early days of the web. You had entry to this huge quantity of knowledge, but it surely was actually laborious to search out. Then, serps made it simple to run a search and discover related content material. For us, Atlan turned Google for Information.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
Transferring past easy information discovery, Daniel’s staff launched information glossaries, definitions, and complete phrases, enabling deeper dives into information, and using lineage to know upstream and downstream dependencies with ease.
With this beneficial context unlocked, their subsequent step was to ship it on to enterprise customers, who primarily eat information throughout the Sigma, with out switching to different instruments.
“That’s the place Atlan’s Chrome Extension turned a game-changer,” Daniel shared.
Atlan’s Chrome Extension reworked information consumption inside Sigma. With context about their information property—dashboard descriptions, information definitions, tags, lineage, notifications, and upstream high quality alerts—now obtainable straight in Sigma, customers now not needed to leap between instruments to perform their duties.
Obtainable 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 exhibits this data, we might simply add it, then customers have been robotically up and operating, enhancing their effectivity, and instantly seeing the profit.”
Challenge Decision for Engineers and Shoppers, Alike
With context about their information property made obtainable in Sigma, Daniel and his staff started work to enhance the method of troubleshooting and speaking points associated to those property. Upon receiving a ticket, North’s engineering staff as soon as spent vital time looking out by means of Sigma to establish the property referenced within the request. And not using a direct hyperlink between tickets and these property, decision would usually 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, they usually didn’t even realize it as a result of a number of tickets have been submitted by a number of individuals.”
By integrating the Atlan Chrome Extension with Jira and Slack, North’s information shoppers may elevate points straight of their instrument of selection, with a hyperlink to particular property included robotically, permitting Information Engineers to know when and the place points occurred.
For information shoppers in Sigma, this integration provided a complete historical past of all Jira tickets and Slack conversations referring to particular information property, and for engineers, a way of stopping duplicate tickets or a number of engineers engaged on the identical situation, and time financial savings by higher understanding related, previous points.
Eliminating duplicate work, or eliminating your engineers engaged on the identical mission with out figuring out about it? These effectivity good points are large, 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 information. Whereas enhancements in information discovery and enrichment are essential, Daniel’s staff realized the worth of those enhancements could be restricted to a small variety of trusted customers with out sturdy information governance and documentation securing these property.
To safe delicate information and implement stringent entry insurance policies, North’s information staff selected to make the most of Dynamic Information Masking with Snowflake, providing complete column-level masking for delicate information, and policy-based management for customers.
With a view to make the most of Dynamic Information Masking, Daniel and his staff started the method of figuring out particular information property that these insurance policies would apply to. Given the size and complexity of their information panorama, they acknowledged {that a} granular, asset-by-asset strategy could be not solely time-consuming, however probably error-prone. Trying to find a solution to establish and safe these property programmatically, Daniel turned to Atlan.
“How do you discover and tag 1000’s of property? You don’t Google it, you Atlan it. It’s actually easy,” Daniel defined.
Governing Hundreds of Property, on the Click on of a Button
Moderately than painstakingly finding these property, then tagging them one-by-one, their staff utilized Atlan Playbooks, rules-based bulk automations that might establish 1000’s of property based mostly on chosen standards, then robotically apply actions, corresponding to including chosen tags and insurance policies.
By the point I added a filter, Atlan scanned our 225,000 property and nearly 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 property meet that standards. Hours of handbook analysis and testing, earlier than Atlan, was transformed into a pair seconds.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
Rapidly figuring out 1000’s of property to better-secure, Daniel’s staff used Playbooks to construct workflows that might robotically apply the appropriate tag to the appropriate 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 muse for Dynamic Information Masking at North, robotically making use of masking insurance policies based mostly on how and from whom information was queried.
By combining Atlan Playbooks, Two-way Tag Sync, and Automated Lineage with Snowflake Dynamic Information Masking, North efficiently ruled 1000’s of knowledge property in document 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 sophisticated and really handbook. However with Atlan, you can’t solely hint information lineage and set up the complexity, however you possibly can see recognition and utilization metrics that assist prioritize the place efforts are wanted probably the most, or the place the most important influence may very well be made.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
Via this programmatic strategy, Daniel’s staff affected a 700% improve in tagged property, considerably enhancing their safety and compliance, and paving the best way for a big improve within the variety of their colleagues trusted to make use of information.
“We’ve used Atlan to spice up the pace and accuracy of our asset tagging by greater than 700% since implementation,” Daniel shared. “With the power to find information quicker, apply tags, and reverse sync that information again into Snowflake, we added greater than 2,000 governance property in underneath a 12 months. That’s simply the tip of the iceberg.”
Thousands and thousands in Worth, in Months
In lower than one 12 months of being outfitted with Atlan, Daniel and his staff reworked the best way North makes use of and governs its information, unlocking the potential for hundreds of thousands in worth by means of effectivity good points, value reductions, and enhanced threat 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 by means of accelerated information discovery and decreased effort understanding lineage.
“That’s $1.4 million of duplicate work, handbook and tedious analysis. That’s time we will now spend on altering issues, versus attempting to navigate information 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 staff estimate an annual value financial savings of greater than $20,000 by deprecating greater than 10,000 idle property and inefficient queries.
“That financial savings was principally handed to us on a silver platter with no further work,” Daniel remarked.
Past value financial savings and effectivity good points, and existential to an organization that processes delicate monetary information, lies vital threat mitigation. By rising their tagged property by 700%, rapidly and in bulk, North’s governance and safety improved nearly in a single day, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in decreased threat.
We’ve been capable of cut back our threat and publicity by hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands 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 information discovery, with context about their information property supporting a 200% year-over-year improve in self-service analytics adoption, or in Information Governance, driving hundreds of thousands in threat mitigation, it’s the mixture of those packages that’s set to remodel the best way North makes use of information.
By affecting a leap ahead in the best way that North manages entry management and ensures safety throughout a large information property, the best way Daniel’s staff defines a trusted consumer of knowledge is evolving and increasing considerably.
“Information Governance gave us the boldness to securely and securely share extra information in Sigma,” Daniel defined.Now assured that probably the most delicate information is safe, appropriately tagged, and ruled by the appropriate entry coverage, North can confidently provide information 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 mix of improved governance insurance policies, tags, and dynamic information masking, we have been ready to make use of information with confidence. As a result of enhanced consumer expertise, mixed with the elevated information availability, we anticipate to proceed or exceed our self-service surroundings progress charges.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
Mere years after adopting Snowflake as the muse of their Trendy Information Stack, and fewer than a 12 months after adopting Atlan, North’s information property has reworked from, as Daniel described, a “Information Desert” into an “Oasis.”
“For the reason that information by no means leaves our umbrella, there’s no extra flat recordsdata which can be shared,” Daniel defined. “There’s no extra a number of variations of the reality, and our information has a stage of confidence, leading to quicker and extra knowledgeable choices.”
Regardless of the unbelievable accomplishments of North’s information staff, constructing self-service analytics and Information Governance capabilities from scratch in document time, Daniel believes there’s nonetheless a lot extra to perform.
Within the months and years to return, their information staff is raring to make use of Atlan AI to simplify advanced queries into pure language, and speed up the enrichment of their information property. And by supporting a rising variety of Information Stewards to independently share and doc data, a extra knowledgeable and empowered group of enterprise customers is rising.
Reflecting on their journey with Atlan, Daniel emphasised that past the appropriate expertise, staff, and technique lies an important factor: The proper partnership.
One of the crucial necessary issues about Atlan has been the individuals. They’re information those that have labored within the business, perceive what you’re going by means of, and perceive what you’re speaking about from the second you begin the dialog.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
Picture by Jonas Leupe on Unsplash
