Combining Atlan, Snowflake, and Sigma to Democratize Entry to Effectively-governed Information
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 energetic 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 group is projecting $1.4mm in annual effectivity good points and a 200% progress in Sigma adoption whereas realizing a 700% enhance in tagged Snowflake belongings which has contributed to mitigating hundreds of 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 by means of fee gateways, cell 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 knowledge property comprising 225,000 belongings, totaling 41 terabytes on Snowflake, the duty of managing and governing North’s knowledge belongs to Daniel Dowdy, Vice President of Information Analytics & Governance, serving for 13 years on the firm. Becoming a member of Atlan at Snowflake Summit 2024, Daniel shared his group’s journey, constructing and governing a contemporary knowledge stack that helps each inside knowledge shoppers and their flagship merchandise.
What do 20 subsidiaries and types, and 100,000+ retailers, imply for our group? It means we’ve a variety of knowledge. We use that knowledge to help a few of our hottest merchandise.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information 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 essential, 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 attainable.”
Earlier than Snowflake, Information 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 information circulated throughout the group.
As soon as a file goes out, that knowledge 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 fact. So, you’re battling a number of sources of the reality.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
The shortage of a single supply of fact difficult efforts to drive belief in North’s knowledge, and with out clear lineage and governance, controlling that knowledge as soon as it left their fingers proved troublesome.
After Snowflake + Sigma, Correct, Actual-time Information
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 group traded cumbersome ETL workflows and embraced the effectivity of recent ELT processes.
“We went from a ‘Information Desert,’ the place retrieving data took days, to an oasis the place knowledge was accessible in actual time, and we may question it in seconds,” stated Daniel.
Whereas Snowflake represented a major leap ahead within the availability and reliability of knowledge, Daniel’s group had been nonetheless liable for fielding easy requests for knowledge entry. To cut back this workload, and to make knowledge much more accessible to a rising variety of shoppers, their group 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 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 a variety of burden off our knowledge group.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
North has since engineered a contemporary knowledge stack, establishing 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 resembling Qlik, Snowpipe, and Kafka, all converging inside Snowflake.
As the quantity and number of knowledge grew, so did the demand for entry, shifting the problem from mere knowledge accessibility to the extra advanced points of knowledge governance and discovery.
“What grew to become the issue was discover the information, and govern it nicely,” 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 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 pleased with the outcomes,” Daniel shared.
This near-instant connection remodeled knowledge 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 knowledge property.
Atlan began getting us this speedy worth by means of knowledge discovery. The best way I hold fascinated by it was the early days of the web. You had entry to this huge quantity of data, but it surely was actually laborious to seek 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 Information.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
Shifting past easy knowledge discovery, Daniel’s group launched knowledge glossaries, definitions, and complete phrases, enabling deeper dives into knowledge, 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 knowledge 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 remodeled knowledge consumption inside Sigma. With context about their knowledge belongings—dashboard descriptions, knowledge definitions, tags, lineage, notifications, and upstream high quality alerts—now accessible instantly in Sigma, customers 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 reveals this data, we’d simply add it, then customers had been mechanically up and working, bettering their effectivity, and instantly seeing the profit.”
Situation Decision for Engineers and Customers, Alike
With context about their knowledge belongings made accessible in Sigma, Daniel and his group started work to enhance the method of troubleshooting and speaking points associated to those belongings. Upon receiving a ticket, North’s engineering group as soon as spent vital time looking out by means of Sigma to establish the belongings referenced within the request. With no direct hyperlink between tickets and these belongings, decision would typically be delayed, and work can be duplicated.
“It was actually inefficient,” Daniel shared. “Generally even the identical engineers can be engaged on the identical mission, and so they 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 shoppers may increase points instantly of their device of alternative, with a hyperlink to particular belongings included mechanically, permitting Information Engineers to grasp when and the place points occurred.
For knowledge shoppers in Sigma, this integration provided 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 subject, and time financial savings by higher understanding comparable, previous points.
Eliminating duplicate work, or eliminating your engineers engaged on the identical mission with out figuring out about it? These effectivity good points are large, and the financial savings add up actually rapidly.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
Introducing Snowflake Dynamic Information 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 group realized the worth of those enhancements can 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 group selected to make the most of Dynamic Information Masking with Snowflake, providing complete column-level masking for delicate knowledge, and policy-based management for customers.
With the intention to make the most of Dynamic Information Masking, Daniel and his group 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 method can be not solely time-consuming, however probably error-prone. Looking for a strategy to establish 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 Hundreds of Belongings, on the Click on of a Button
Fairly than painstakingly finding these belongings, then tagging them one-by-one, their group utilized Atlan Playbooks, rules-based bulk automations that might establish hundreds of belongings based mostly on chosen standards, then mechanically apply actions, resembling including chosen tags and insurance policies.
By the point I added a filter, Atlan scanned our 225,000 belongings and nearly instantly discovered 45 matches. As I modified the filters so as to add new ones, it continually up to date to point out me what number of belongings meet that standards. Hours of handbook analysis and testing, earlier than Atlan, was transformed into a pair seconds.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
Rapidly figuring out hundreds of belongings to better-secure, Daniel’s group used Playbooks to construct workflows that might 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 muse for Dynamic Information 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 Information Masking, North efficiently ruled hundreds of knowledge belongings in document 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 knowledge lineage and set up 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 affect could possibly be made.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
By this programmatic method, Daniel’s group affected a 700% enhance in tagged belongings, considerably bettering their safety and compliance, and paving the best way for a major enhance 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 sooner, apply tags, and reverse sync that knowledge again into Snowflake, we added greater than 2,000 governance belongings in underneath 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 group remodeled the best way North makes use of and governs its knowledge, unlocking the potential for hundreds of thousands in worth by means of effectivity good points, value reductions, and enhanced danger 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 yr in effort by means of accelerated knowledge discovery and lowered effort understanding lineage.
“That’s $1.4 million of duplicate work, handbook and tedious analysis. That’s time we will now spend on altering issues, versus attempting 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 surroundings, Daniel and his group 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 principally handed to us on a silver platter with no additional work,” Daniel remarked.
Past value financial savings and effectivity good points, and existential to an organization that processes delicate monetary knowledge, lies vital danger mitigation. By growing their tagged belongings by 700%, rapidly and in bulk, North’s governance and safety improved nearly in a single day, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in lowered danger.
We’ve been in a position to scale back our danger and publicity by hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands of {dollars}.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information 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 enhance in self-service analytics adoption, or in Information Governance, driving hundreds of thousands in danger mitigation, it’s the mixture of those packages that’s set to remodel 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 group defines a trusted person of knowledge is evolving and increasing considerably.
“Information Governance gave us the arrogance 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 proper 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 attempting 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 surroundings progress charges.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
Mere years after adopting Snowflake as the muse of their Trendy Information Stack, and fewer than a yr after adopting Atlan, North’s knowledge property has remodeled from, as Daniel described, a “Information Desert” into an “Oasis.”
“For the reason that knowledge 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 knowledge has a degree of confidence, leading to sooner and extra knowledgeable choices.”
Regardless of the unimaginable accomplishments of North’s knowledge group, constructing self-service analytics and Information Governance capabilities from scratch in document time, Daniel believes there’s nonetheless a lot extra to perform.
Within the months and years to come back, their knowledge group is raring to make use of Atlan AI to simplify advanced queries into pure language, and speed up the enrichment of their knowledge belongings. And by supporting a rising variety of Information Stewards to independently share and doc information, a extra knowledgeable and empowered group of enterprise customers is rising.
Reflecting on their journey with Atlan, Daniel emphasised that past the proper know-how, group, and technique lies an important factor: The correct partnership.
One of the vital vital issues about Atlan has been the individuals. They’re knowledge people who have labored within the business, 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, Information Analytics & Governance
Picture by Jonas Leupe on Unsplash
