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 knowledge discovery and governance atop their Snowflake- and Sigma-powered trendy knowledge stack
- Adopting Atlan as their lively metadata platform, North has since achieved end-to-end visibility of 225,000 knowledge belongings, securing delicate knowledge, and growing adoption of self-service analytics
- In lower than a yr, their crew is projecting $1.4mm in annual effectivity features and a 200% progress in Sigma adoption whereas realizing a 700% improve in tagged Snowflake belongings 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 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 way of cost 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 enormous knowledge property comprising 225,000 belongings, totaling 41 terabytes on Snowflake, the accountability of managing and governing North’s knowledge 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 knowledge stack that helps each inside knowledge customers and their flagship merchandise.
What do 20 subsidiaries and types, and 100,000+ retailers, imply for our crew? It means we have now lots of knowledge. We use that knowledge 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 thing 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 supply close to real-time reporting and transaction-level reporting to our prospects,” 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 knowledge. Easy duties like pulling uncooked knowledge or producing studies may take days and even weeks, hindered by ETL bottlenecks and knowledge silos scattered throughout a number of servers and databases, or Excel recordsdata circulated throughout the group.
As soon as a file goes out, that knowledge 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 battling a number of sources of the reality.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Knowledge Analytics & Governance
The shortage of a single supply of reality sophisticated efforts to drive belief in North’s knowledge, and with out clear lineage and governance, controlling that knowledge as soon as it left their palms proved troublesome.
After Snowflake + Sigma, Correct, Actual-time Knowledge
In 2019, North adopted Snowflake as their enterprise knowledge lake, considerably bettering their knowledge 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 contemporary ELT processes.
“We went from a ‘Knowledge Desert,’ the place retrieving data took days, to an oasis the place knowledge was out there 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 crew had been nonetheless chargeable for fielding easy requests for knowledge entry. To scale back this workload, and to make knowledge much more accessible to a rising variety of customers, their crew launched Sigma, a enterprise intelligence device that empowers customers to independently entry, analyze, and visualize knowledge, providing essential data 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 progress now exceeding 200%.
Starting with 10 customers in 2019, we now have over 350 customers in Sigma, with an annual progress charge of greater than 200% year-over-year. Now, Sigma is our self-service analytics platform, and it’s taken lots of burden off our knowledge crew.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Knowledge Analytics & Governance
North has since engineered a contemporary knowledge stack, organising sturdy pipelines that seamlessly ingest and replicate knowledge 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 amount and number of knowledge grew, so did the demand for entry, shifting the problem from mere knowledge accessibility to the extra complicated points of knowledge governance and discovery.
“What turned the issue was find out how to discover the info, and find out how to govern it properly,” Daniel shared. “Atlan turned the central level addressing all of those issues.”
Unlocking Snowflake and Sigma with Atlan
Connecting to over 225,000 knowledge 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 knowledge discovery at North, as soon as a chaotic expertise of leaping by way of a number of silos, all of a sudden making it easy to navigate and perceive their knowledge property.
Atlan began getting us this fast worth by way of knowledge discovery. The way in which I preserve excited about it was the early days of the web. You had entry to this huge quantity of data, but it surely was actually exhausting 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 knowledge discovery, Daniel’s crew launched knowledge glossaries, definitions, and complete phrases, enabling deeper dives into knowledge, and using lineage to know upstream and downstream dependencies with ease.
With this worthwhile context unlocked, their subsequent step was to ship it on to enterprise customers, who primarily devour knowledge 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 knowledge consumption inside Sigma. With context about their knowledge belongings—dashboard descriptions, knowledge definitions, tags, lineage, notifications, and upstream high quality indicators—now out there 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 had been mechanically up and working, bettering their effectivity, and instantly seeing the profit.”
Concern Decision for Engineers and Customers, Alike
With context about their knowledge belongings made out there 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 vital time looking out by way of Sigma to establish the belongings referenced within the request. With no direct hyperlink between tickets and these belongings, 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 mission, they usually didn’t even understand 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 knowledge customers may increase points straight of their device of selection, with a hyperlink to particular belongings included mechanically, permitting Knowledge Engineers to know when and the place points occurred.
For knowledge customers in Sigma, this integration supplied a complete historical past of all Jira tickets and Slack conversations referring to particular knowledge belongings, and for engineers, a way 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 mission with out understanding about it? These effectivity features 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 knowledge. Whereas enhancements in knowledge 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 knowledge governance and documentation securing these belongings.
To safe delicate knowledge and implement stringent entry insurance policies, North’s knowledge crew selected to make the most of Dynamic Knowledge Masking with Snowflake, providing complete column-level masking for delicate knowledge, and policy-based management for customers.
With a purpose to make the most of Dynamic Knowledge Masking, Daniel and his crew started the method of figuring out particular knowledge belongings that these insurance policies would apply to. Given the dimensions and complexity of their knowledge 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 belongings programmatically, Daniel turned to Atlan.
“How do you discover and tag 1000’s 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
Reasonably than painstakingly finding these belongings, then tagging them one-by-one, their crew utilized Atlan Playbooks, rules-based bulk automations that would establish 1000’s of belongings based mostly on chosen standards, then mechanically apply actions, reminiscent of 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 continuously up to date to point out 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
Rapidly figuring out 1000’s of belongings to better-secure, Daniel’s crew used Playbooks to construct workflows that may mechanically apply the correct tag to the correct 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 based mostly on how and from whom knowledge 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 belongings 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 guide. However with Atlan, you cannot solely hint knowledge lineage and set up the complexity, however you’ll be able to see recognition and utilization metrics that assist prioritize the place efforts are wanted probably the most, or the place the largest affect could possibly be made.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Knowledge Analytics & Governance
By this programmatic strategy, Daniel’s crew affected a 700% improve in tagged belongings, considerably bettering their safety and compliance, and paving the best way for a big improve within the variety of their colleagues trusted to make use of knowledge.
“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 knowledge quicker, apply tags, and reverse sync that knowledge again into Snowflake, we added greater than 2,000 governance belongings in beneath a yr. That’s simply the tip of the iceberg.”
Tens of millions in Worth, in Months
In lower than one yr of being outfitted with Atlan, Daniel and his crew reworked the best way North makes use of and governs its knowledge, unlocking the potential for hundreds of thousands in worth by way of effectivity features, 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 yr in effort by way of accelerated knowledge discovery and decreased 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 knowledge 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 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 features, and existential to an organization that processes delicate monetary knowledge, lies vital threat mitigation. By growing their tagged belongings by 700%, rapidly and in bulk, North’s governance and safety improved virtually 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, Knowledge Analytics & Governance
A 200% Enhance in Self-service Analytics, with Room to Develop
Whereas these enhancements are spectacular, whether or not in knowledge discovery, with context about their knowledge belongings supporting a 200% year-over-year improve in self-service analytics adoption, or in Knowledge Governance, driving hundreds of thousands in threat mitigation, it’s the mixture of those applications that’s set to rework the best way North makes use of knowledge.
By affecting a leap ahead in the best way that North manages entry management and ensures safety throughout a large knowledge property, the best way Daniel’s crew defines a trusted person of knowledge is evolving and increasing considerably.
“Knowledge Governance gave us the boldness to securely and securely share extra knowledge in Sigma,” Daniel defined.Now assured that probably the most delicate knowledge is safe, appropriately tagged, and ruled by the correct entry coverage, North can confidently provide knowledge 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 mix of improved governance insurance policies, tags, and dynamic knowledge masking, we had been in a position to make use of knowledge with confidence. As a result of enhanced person expertise, mixed with the elevated knowledge availability, we anticipate to proceed or exceed our self-service setting progress charges.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Knowledge Analytics & Governance
Mere years after adopting Snowflake as the inspiration of their Fashionable Knowledge Stack, and fewer than a yr after adopting Atlan, North’s knowledge property has reworked from, as Daniel described, a “Knowledge Desert” into an “Oasis.”
“For the reason that knowledge by no means leaves our umbrella, there’s no extra flat recordsdata which might be shared,” Daniel defined. “There’s no extra a number of variations of the reality, and our knowledge has a stage of confidence, leading to quicker and extra knowledgeable choices.”
Regardless of the unbelievable accomplishments of North’s knowledge crew, constructing self-service analytics and Knowledge 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 knowledge crew is raring to make use of Atlan AI to simplify complicated queries into pure language, and speed up the enrichment of their knowledge belongings. 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 correct know-how, crew, and technique lies a vital aspect: The correct partnership.
One of the crucial necessary issues about Atlan has been the individuals. They’re knowledge those that have labored within the trade, perceive what you’re going by way 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
