Snowflake, a cloud data platform, recently announced the general availability of Snowflake on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the AWS Asia Pacific (India) Region. This development builds on Snowflake’s efforts to support its Indian customers that want to keep their data in India and leverage the flexibility and scalability offered by a cloud data platform.
Telling us more about Snowflake’s plans, Vimal Venkatram, Country Manager, Snowflake gives us a clear understanding on the functioning of cloud.
Do you think the pandemic has widened the increased usage and need of cloud-based solutions?
The current situation has made digital technologies more important than ever as companies realise the importance and ease of cloud-based solutions. It has also highlighted the need for organisations and the public sector to accelerate programs to digitize customer interactions and operations, including the supply chain, and to develop innovative capabilities, products, and services.
These programs would not be achievable without cloud technologies, and executives at large organisations have indicated to EY in a survey that cloud technologies have received the greatest share of investment over the last two years.
The need for Indian businesses to continue on their digital journeys and embed this with cloud-based solutions is even more imperative.
How is Snowflake faring differently from other players in the market?
Our unique offering is the Snowflake Cloud Data Platform. There is no hardware (virtual or physical) or even software for you to select, install, configure, or manage. We handle all the ongoing maintenance, management, and tuning.
We run completely on cloud infrastructure. Our unique architecture empowers data analysts, engineers, scientists, and application developers to work with any data in the network without the performance, concurrency, or scale limitations of other solutions. Our near-zero maintenance cloud data platform features integrated service layers that can scale independently of one another, making it an ideal platform for many workloads.
Snowflake addresses issues such as scalability on your computing power and workloads, the cost and trouble of static data sharing methods. It allows organizations to scale up and down, paying for only what you use and having a platform for secure sharing of data across the organization. In addition, Snowflake allows organizations to have cross-cloud capabilities, which removes barriers to data. This makes it available for analysis to inform decision-making, no matter where the data is located. Organizations can also ensure business continuity and disaster recovery through cross-cloud replication and the ability to perform account migration without the data portability concerns. This gives organizations the flexibility, scalability, and visibility to run their business.
Could you give us an insight into Snowflake’s technical inculcations?
Conventional data platforms and big data solutions struggle to deliver on their fundamental purpose, which is to enable users to work with any data without limitations on scale, performance, or flexibility.
To solve this issue, we built a cloud data platform from the ground up to support a multi-cloud strategy, including a cross-cloud approach. It is designed with a patented new architecture to serve as the centerpiece for the development of data pipelines and applications, data warehousing capabilities, data lakes, and the creation of data exchanges to easily and securely share governed data.
How important do you think is it for people to rely on technology? Are there any major follies per se?
I think that it is not just about people relying on technology, but about how organisations embrace technology to enhance customer experiences.
For example, organisations can use the cloud and cloud computing technologies to break down barriers to the easy flow of data, transform analytics capabilities, and unlock data-driven insights. Helping organizations streamline and quickly access their data will allow them to make better, faster decisions.
As data becomes the new currency, we also see that data privacy and governance is crucial for organizations in protecting their customers’ data. This is an added area where it is important for organisations to have governed access to their entire network. Secure data sharing is important too, as it provides any organization easy access to shared data, so they can combine it with their existing data to get the deepest insights possible.
The recent announcement of the general availability of Snowflake on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in India gives local businesses the capabilities to quickly access their data, and gain insights, safely and securely.