Combining Atlan, Snowflake, and Sigma to Democratize Entry to Properly-governed Knowledge
At a Look
- North, a number one funds answer 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 energetic metadata platform, North has since achieved end-to-end visibility of 225,000 information property, securing delicate information, and growing adoption of self-service analytics
- In lower than a 12 months, their crew is projecting $1.4mm in annual effectivity positive factors and a 200% development in Sigma adoption whereas realizing a 700% improve in tagged Snowflake property which has contributed to mitigating thousands and thousands of {dollars} in threat
For over 30 years, North has established itself as a number one funds answer 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 by cost 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 accountability of managing and governing North’s information belongs to Daniel Dowdy, Vice President of Knowledge 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 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 crew? It means we’ve got plenty of information. We use that information to help a few of our hottest merchandise.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Knowledge 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 heart for every part from transaction monitoring and reporting to stock administration and fraud safety. To ship crucial, transaction-level reporting to their prospects, 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 prospects,” Daniel shared. “With out Snowflake, this simply wouldn’t be attainable.”
Earlier than Snowflake, Knowledge Silos
Earlier than Snowflake, North struggled with unchecked and unclear information. Easy duties like pulling uncooked information or producing studies might 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 combating a number of sources of the reality.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Knowledge Analytics & Governance
The dearth of a single supply of reality difficult efforts to drive belief in North’s information, and with out clear lineage and governance, controlling that information as soon as it left their palms proved troublesome.
After Snowflake + Sigma, Correct, Actual-time Knowledge
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 crew traded cumbersome ETL workflows and embraced the effectivity of recent ELT processes.
“We went from a ‘Knowledge Desert,’ the place retrieving data took days, to an oasis the place information was accessible in actual time, and we might question it in seconds,” mentioned Daniel.
Whereas Snowflake represented a major leap ahead within the availability and reliability of knowledge, Daniel’s crew had been nonetheless answerable for fielding easy requests for information entry. To cut back this workload, and to make information much more accessible to a rising variety of shoppers, their crew 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 shortly embraced Sigma, leading to a skyrocketing adoption fee, 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 fee of greater than 200% year-over-year. Now, Sigma is our self-service analytics platform, and it’s taken plenty of burden off our information crew.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Knowledge Analytics & Governance
North has since engineered a contemporary information stack, establishing strong pipelines that seamlessly ingest and replicate information from numerous sources like Oracle, MySQL, Salesforce, and S3. This wealth of knowledge is then channeled into highly effective instruments reminiscent of Qlik, Snowpipe, and Kafka, all converging inside Snowflake.
As the quantity 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 grew to become the issue was the best way to discover the info, and the best way to govern it effectively,” 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 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 had 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 a number of silos, abruptly making it easy to navigate and perceive their information property.
Atlan began getting us this fast worth by information discovery. The best way I preserve serious 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, engines like google made it straightforward to run a search and discover related content material. For us, Atlan grew to become Google for Knowledge.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Knowledge Analytics & Governance
Transferring past easy information discovery, Daniel’s crew launched information glossaries, definitions, and complete phrases, enabling deeper dives into information, and using lineage to grasp upstream and downstream dependencies with ease.
With this beneficial context unlocked, their subsequent step was to ship it on to enterprise customers, who primarily devour information throughout 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 reworked information consumption inside Sigma. With context about their information property—dashboard descriptions, information definitions, tags, lineage, notifications, and upstream high quality alerts—now accessible immediately in Sigma, customers now not needed to soar 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 reveals this data, we’d simply add it, then customers had been routinely up and working, enhancing their effectivity, and instantly seeing the profit.”
Subject Decision for Engineers and Shoppers, Alike
With context about their information property made accessible in Sigma, Daniel and his crew started work to enhance the method of troubleshooting and speaking points associated to those property. Upon receiving a ticket, North’s engineering crew as soon as spent vital time looking by Sigma to determine the property referenced within the request. With out a direct hyperlink between tickets and these property, decision would usually be delayed, and work could be duplicated.
“It was actually inefficient,” Daniel shared. “Typically even the identical engineers could be engaged on the identical challenge, they usually didn’t even realize it as a result of a number of tickets had been submitted by a number of folks.”
By integrating the Atlan Chrome Extension with Jira and Slack, North’s information shoppers might elevate points immediately of their instrument of alternative, with a hyperlink to particular property included routinely, permitting Knowledge Engineers to grasp 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 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 challenge with out realizing about it? These effectivity positive factors are big, and the financial savings add up actually shortly.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Knowledge Analytics & Governance
Introducing Snowflake Dynamic Knowledge Masking
As a funds answer supplier, North handles huge quantities of delicate monetary information. Whereas enhancements in information 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 information governance and documentation securing these property.
To safe delicate information and implement stringent entry insurance policies, North’s information crew selected to make the most of Dynamic Knowledge Masking with Snowflake, providing complete column-level masking for delicate information, and policy-based management for customers.
So as to make the most of Dynamic Knowledge Masking, Daniel and his crew 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 method could be not solely time-consuming, however doubtlessly error-prone. Looking for a option to determine 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 1000’s of Property, on the Click on of a Button
Relatively than painstakingly finding these property, then tagging them one-by-one, their crew utilized Atlan Playbooks, rules-based bulk automations that would determine 1000’s of property based mostly on chosen standards, then routinely apply actions, reminiscent of 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 continually 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, Knowledge Analytics & Governance
Shortly figuring out 1000’s of property to better-secure, Daniel’s crew used Playbooks to construct workflows that might routinely apply the fitting tag to the fitting 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 Knowledge Masking at North, routinely 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 Knowledge Masking, North efficiently ruled 1000’s of knowledge property in file time with a programmatic method, 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 handbook. However with Atlan, you cannot solely hint information lineage and manage the complexity, however you may see recognition 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, Knowledge Analytics & Governance
Via this programmatic method, Daniel’s crew affected a 700% improve in tagged property, 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 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 sooner, apply tags, and reverse sync that information again into Snowflake, we added greater than 2,000 governance property 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 geared up with Atlan, Daniel and his crew reworked the way in which North makes use of and governs its information, unlocking the potential for thousands and thousands in worth by effectivity positive factors, price 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 accelerated information discovery and lowered effort understanding lineage.
“That’s $1.4 million of duplicate work, handbook and tedious analysis. That’s time we are able to now spend on altering issues, versus making an attempt 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 setting, Daniel and his crew estimate an annual price financial savings of greater than $20,000 by deprecating greater than 10,000 idle property and inefficient queries.
“That financial savings was mainly handed to us on a silver platter with no additional work,” Daniel remarked.
Past price financial savings and effectivity positive factors, and existential to an organization that processes delicate monetary information, lies vital threat mitigation. By growing their tagged property by 700%, shortly and in bulk, North’s governance and safety improved nearly in a single day, to the tune of thousands and thousands of {dollars} in lowered threat.
We’ve been capable of cut back our threat and publicity by thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of {dollars}.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Knowledge Analytics & Governance
A 200% Enhance 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 Knowledge Governance, driving thousands and thousands in threat mitigation, it’s the mixture of those packages that’s set to remodel the way in which North makes use of information.
By affecting a leap ahead in the way in which that North manages entry management and ensures safety throughout a large information property, the way in which Daniel’s crew defines a trusted consumer of knowledge is evolving and increasing considerably.
“Knowledge Governance gave us the boldness to soundly 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 fitting 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 had been in a state of near-paralysis making an attempt to manually decide who ought to see what. Using a mixture of improved governance insurance policies, tags, and dynamic information masking, we had been in a position to make use of information with confidence. As a result of enhanced consumer expertise, mixed with the elevated information availability, we count on to proceed or exceed our self-service setting development charges.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Knowledge Analytics & Governance
Mere years after adopting Snowflake as the muse of their Trendy Knowledge Stack, and fewer than a 12 months after adopting Atlan, North’s information property has reworked from, as Daniel described, a “Knowledge Desert” into an “Oasis.”
“For the reason that information by no means leaves our umbrella, there’s no extra flat recordsdata which are shared,” Daniel defined. “There’s no extra a number of variations of the reality, and our information has a stage of confidence, leading to sooner and extra knowledgeable selections.”
Regardless of the unbelievable accomplishments of North’s information crew, constructing self-service analytics and Knowledge 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 information crew is keen 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 Knowledge 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 fitting expertise, crew, and technique lies an important component: The suitable partnership.
One of the vital necessary issues about Atlan has been the folks. They’re information folks that have labored within the business, perceive what you’re going by, and perceive what you’re speaking about from the second you begin the dialog.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Knowledge Analytics & Governance
Photograph by Jonas Leupe on Unsplash
