Combining Atlan, Snowflake, and Sigma to Democratize Entry to Effectively-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 fashionable 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 yr, their workforce is projecting $1.4mm in annual effectivity positive aspects and a 200% development in Sigma adoption whereas realizing a 700% enhance in tagged Snowflake property which has contributed to mitigating thousands and thousands of {dollars} in danger
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 fee wants, supporting brick-and-mortar and on-line shops via fee gateways, cellular options, and extra. Dedicated to serving industries that span eating places to authorities entities, North goals to be the simplest end-to-end funds supplier to do enterprise with.
With an unlimited 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 workforce’s journey, constructing and governing a contemporary information stack that helps each inner information customers and their flagship merchandise.
What do 20 subsidiaries and types, and 100,000+ retailers, imply for our workforce? It means now we have a number 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 middle for every part from transaction monitoring and reporting to stock administration and fraud safety. To ship important, transaction-level reporting to their prospects, North depends on Snowflake.
“We make the most of Snowflake for each of those on the backend to offer close to real-time reporting and transaction-level reporting to our prospects,” Daniel shared. “With out Snowflake, this simply wouldn’t be potential.”
Earlier than Snowflake, Knowledge Silos
Earlier than Snowflake, North struggled with unchecked and unclear information. Easy duties like pulling uncooked information or producing studies may take days and even weeks, hindered by ETL bottlenecks and information silos scattered throughout a number of servers and databases, or Excel information 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 fact. So, you’re combating a number of sources of the reality.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Knowledge Analytics & Governance
The shortage of a single supply of fact 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 tough.
After Snowflake + Sigma, Correct, Actual-time Knowledge
In 2019, North adopted Snowflake as their enterprise information lake, considerably bettering their information science, analytics, and reporting capabilities. By shifting from outdated batch processing to real-time CDC options, their workforce traded cumbersome ETL workflows and embraced the effectivity of contemporary ELT processes.
“We went from a ‘Knowledge Desert,’ the place retrieving info took days, to an oasis the place information was out there in actual time, and we may question it in seconds,” mentioned Daniel.
Whereas Snowflake represented a big leap ahead within the availability and reliability of information, Daniel’s workforce had been nonetheless accountable for fielding easy requests for information entry. To cut back this workload, and to make information much more accessible to a rising variety of customers, their workforce launched Sigma, a enterprise intelligence instrument that empowers customers to independently entry, analyze, and visualize information, providing essential info in a self-service method.
With its acquainted, Excel-like interface, enterprise customers rapidly embraced Sigma, leading to a skyrocketing adoption charge, with annual person 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 a number of burden off our information workforce.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Knowledge 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 information is then channeled into highly effective instruments similar to 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 information governance and discovery.
“What turned the issue was learn how to discover the information, and learn how 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 had been built-in with Snowflake and Sigma, connecting to over 225,000 property. We’re so proud of the outcomes,” Daniel shared.
This near-instant connection remodeled information discovery at North, as soon as a chaotic expertise of leaping via a number of silos, all of a sudden making it easy to navigate and perceive their information property.
Atlan began getting us this quick worth via information discovery. The way in which I hold fascinated about it was the early days of the web. You had entry to this huge quantity of knowledge, but it surely was actually arduous to seek out. Then, engines like google made it simple to run a search and discover related content material. For us, Atlan turned Google for Knowledge.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Knowledge Analytics & Governance
Transferring past easy information discovery, Daniel’s workforce 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 precious context unlocked, their subsequent step was to ship it on to enterprise customers, who primarily devour information inside 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 remodeled information consumption inside Sigma. With context about their information property—dashboard descriptions, information definitions, tags, lineage, notifications, and upstream high quality alerts—now out there immediately in Sigma, customers now not needed to bounce between instruments to perform their duties.
Out there in a sidebar, Atlan’s Chrome Extension made this info 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 info, we’d simply add it, then customers had been mechanically up and working, bettering their effectivity, and instantly seeing the profit.”
Concern Decision for Engineers and Shoppers, Alike
With context about their information property made out there in Sigma, Daniel and his workforce started work to enhance the method of troubleshooting and speaking points associated to those property. Upon receiving a ticket, North’s engineering workforce as soon as spent important time looking out via Sigma to establish the property referenced within the request. And not using a direct hyperlink between tickets and these property, decision would typically 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 customers may elevate points immediately of their instrument of alternative, with a hyperlink to particular property included mechanically, permitting Knowledge Engineers to grasp when and the place points occurred.
For information customers in Sigma, this integration supplied a complete historical past of all Jira tickets and Slack conversations regarding particular information property, and for engineers, a method of stopping duplicate tickets or a number of engineers engaged on the identical concern, and time financial savings by higher understanding related, previous points.
Eliminating duplicate work, or eliminating your engineers engaged on the identical challenge with out figuring out about it? These effectivity positive aspects are big, and the financial savings add up actually rapidly.”
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 workforce 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 workforce 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.
With the intention to make the most of Dynamic Knowledge Masking, Daniel and his workforce 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 doubtlessly error-prone. Looking for a strategy to establish and safe these property programmatically, Daniel turned to Atlan.
“How do you discover and tag hundreds of property? 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
Relatively than painstakingly finding these property, then tagging them one-by-one, their workforce utilized Atlan Playbooks, rules-based bulk automations that would establish hundreds of property primarily based on chosen standards, then mechanically apply actions, similar 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 consistently 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
Rapidly figuring out hundreds of property to better-secure, Daniel’s workforce 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 Knowledge Masking at North, mechanically making use of masking insurance policies primarily based 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 hundreds of information property 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 sophisticated and really handbook. However with Atlan, you can’t solely hint information lineage and arrange the complexity, however you possibly can see reputation and utilization metrics that assist prioritize the place efforts are wanted essentially the most, or the place the most important affect might be made.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Knowledge Analytics & Governance
By means of this programmatic strategy, Daniel’s workforce affected a 700% enhance in tagged property, considerably bettering their safety and compliance, and paving the best way for a big enhance within the variety of their colleagues trusted to make use of information.
“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 information sooner, apply tags, and reverse sync that information again into Snowflake, we added greater than 2,000 governance property in below a yr. That’s simply the tip of the iceberg.”
Hundreds of thousands in Worth, in Months
In lower than one yr of being geared up with Atlan, Daniel and his workforce remodeled the best way North makes use of and governs its information, unlocking the potential for thousands and thousands in worth via effectivity positive aspects, 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 yr in effort via accelerated information discovery and decreased 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 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 atmosphere, Daniel and his workforce 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 additional work,” Daniel remarked.
Past value financial savings and effectivity positive aspects, and existential to an organization that processes delicate monetary information, lies important danger 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 thousands and thousands of {dollars} in decreased danger.
We’ve been capable of cut back our danger 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 enhance in self-service analytics adoption, or in Knowledge Governance, driving thousands and thousands in danger 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 an enormous information property, the best way Daniel’s workforce defines a trusted person of information is evolving and increasing considerably.
“Knowledge Governance gave us the boldness to securely and securely share extra information in Sigma,” Daniel defined.Now assured that essentially the most delicate information is safe, appropriately tagged, and ruled by the proper entry coverage, North can confidently provide information and self-service analytics capabilities to extra enterprise customers than ever earlier than, enhancing the already important worth they’ve yielded from combining Atlan, Snowflake, and Sigma.
We had 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 information masking, we had been ready to make use of information with confidence. Because of the enhanced person expertise, mixed with the elevated information availability, we anticipate to proceed or exceed our self-service atmosphere development charges.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Knowledge Analytics & Governance
Mere years after adopting Snowflake as the inspiration of their Trendy Knowledge Stack, and fewer than a yr after adopting Atlan, North’s information property has remodeled from, as Daniel described, a “Knowledge Desert” into an “Oasis.”
“Because the information by no means leaves our umbrella, there’s no extra flat information which might be shared,” Daniel defined. “There’s no extra a number of variations of the reality, and our information has a degree of confidence, leading to sooner and extra knowledgeable choices.”
Regardless of the unbelievable accomplishments of North’s information workforce, 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 return, their information workforce 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 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 proper expertise, workforce, and technique lies a vital factor: The best partnership.
One of the vital necessary issues about Atlan has been the folks. They’re information people who have labored within the trade, perceive what you’re going via, and perceive what you’re speaking about from the second you begin the dialog.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Knowledge Analytics & Governance
Picture by Jonas Leupe on Unsplash
