Combining Atlan, Snowflake, and Sigma to Democratize Entry to Properly-governed Knowledge
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 fashionable information stack
- Adopting Atlan as their energetic metadata platform, North has since achieved end-to-end visibility of 225,000 information belongings, 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 beneficial properties and a 200% progress in Sigma adoption whereas realizing a 700% enhance in tagged Snowflake belongings which has contributed to mitigating tens of millions 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 assist a broad vary of cost wants, supporting brick-and-mortar and on-line shops by means of 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 unlimited information property comprising 225,000 belongings, 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 customers and their flagship merchandise.
What do 20 subsidiaries and types, and 100,000+ retailers, imply for our crew? It means we have now plenty of information. We use that information to assist 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 all the pieces from transaction monitoring and reporting to stock administration and fraud safety. To ship crucial, transaction-level reporting to their clients, 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 clients,” Daniel shared. “With out Snowflake, this simply wouldn’t be doable.”
Earlier than Snowflake, Knowledge Silos
Earlier than Snowflake, North struggled with unchecked and unclear information. Easy duties like pulling uncooked information or producing experiences might 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 after that file leaves you, customers can then modify it and make their very own supply of reality. So, you’re battling 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 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 knowledge, Daniel’s crew had 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 customers, their crew launched Sigma, a enterprise intelligence software 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 price, with annual person progress now exceeding 200%.
Starting with 10 customers in 2019, we now have over 350 customers in Sigma, with an annual progress price 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, 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 similar 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 methods to discover the information, and methods 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 belongings 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 belongings. We’re so proud of 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, immediately 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 occupied with it was the early days of the web. You had entry to this huge quantity of knowledge, however it was actually arduous to seek out. Then, search engines like google made it straightforward to run a search and discover related content material. For us, Atlan turned Google for Knowledge.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Knowledge Analytics & Governance
Shifting 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 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 belongings—dashboard descriptions, information definitions, tags, lineage, notifications, and upstream high quality alerts—now obtainable straight in Sigma, customers not needed to soar between instruments to perform their duties.
Out there 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’d simply add it, then customers had been mechanically up and operating, enhancing their effectivity, and instantly seeing the profit.”
Problem Decision for Engineers and Shoppers, Alike
With context about their information 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 important time looking out by means of Sigma to determine the belongings referenced within the request. With out 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 undertaking, they usually didn’t even realize it as a result of a number of tickets had been submitted by a number of individuals.”
By integrating the Atlan Chrome Extension with Jira and Slack, North’s information customers might increase points straight of their software of selection, with a hyperlink to particular belongings 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 belongings, and for engineers, a method of stopping duplicate tickets or a number of engineers engaged on the identical difficulty, and time financial savings by higher understanding comparable, previous points.
Eliminating duplicate work, or eliminating your engineers engaged on the identical undertaking with out figuring out about it? These effectivity beneficial properties 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 resolution 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 sturdy information governance and documentation securing these belongings.
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.
To be able to make the most of Dynamic Knowledge Masking, Daniel and his crew started the method of figuring out particular information belongings 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. Looking for a strategy 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 1000’s of Property, 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 might determine hundreds of belongings 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 belongings and virtually 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 belongings meet that standards. Hours of guide analysis and testing, earlier than Atlan, was transformed into a pair seconds.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Knowledge Analytics & Governance
Shortly figuring out hundreds of belongings to better-secure, Daniel’s crew used Playbooks to construct workflows that might mechanically 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 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 knowledge belongings in report 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 cannot 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 essentially the most, or the place the largest affect may very well be made.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Knowledge Analytics & Governance
Via this programmatic strategy, Daniel’s crew affected a 700% enhance in tagged belongings, considerably enhancing their safety and compliance, and paving the way in which for a major enhance 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 flexibility to find information sooner, apply tags, and reverse sync that information again into Snowflake, we added greater than 2,000 governance belongings in below a 12 months. That’s simply the tip of the iceberg.”
Tens of millions 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 tens of millions in worth by means of effectivity beneficial properties, value reductions, and enhanced threat mitigation.
By thoughtfully converging essential context about Snowflake and Sigma right into a user-friendly information 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 diminished 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 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 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 further work,” Daniel remarked.
Past value financial savings and effectivity beneficial properties, and existential to an organization that processes delicate monetary information, lies important threat mitigation. By growing their tagged belongings by 700%, shortly and in bulk, North’s governance and safety improved virtually in a single day, to the tune of tens of millions of {dollars} in diminished threat.
We’ve been in a position to cut back our threat and publicity by tens of millions and tens of millions of {dollars}.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Knowledge 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 belongings supporting a 200% year-over-year enhance in self-service analytics adoption, or in Knowledge Governance, driving tens of millions in threat mitigation, it’s the mixture of those applications 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 an enormous information property, the way in which Daniel’s crew defines a trusted person of knowledge is evolving and increasing considerably.
“Knowledge Governance gave us the arrogance to soundly 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 appropriate 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 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. Because of the enhanced person expertise, mixed with the elevated information availability, we anticipate to proceed or exceed our self-service surroundings progress 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 information which can 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 crew, constructing self-service analytics and Knowledge Governance capabilities from scratch in report time, Daniel believes there’s nonetheless a lot extra to perform.
Within the months and years to come back, their information crew is raring to make use of Atlan AI to simplify advanced queries into pure language, and speed up the enrichment of their information belongings. And by supporting a rising variety of Knowledge Stewards to independently share and doc information, a extra knowledgeable and empowered neighborhood of enterprise customers is rising.
Reflecting on their journey with Atlan, Daniel emphasised that past the appropriate expertise, crew, and technique lies an important aspect: The fitting partnership.
One of the vital vital issues about Atlan has been the individuals. They’re information those who have labored within the trade, 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, Knowledge Analytics & Governance
Photograph by Jonas Leupe on Unsplash