Data Sharing and Data Monetization with Snowflake

In our data-driven world, information is the new currency, and its value continues to soar. As organizations navigate the vast sea of data, a remarkable shift is underway—one that’s transforming mere bits and bytes into tangible economic assets. Amidst this digital revolution, a powerful concept takes center stage: Data Monetization.

The latest market insights predict an extraordinary trajectory for data monetization, with the market size poised to surge from USD 2.9 billion in 2022 to an impressive USD 7.3 billion by 2027. This ascent, boasting a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 19.5% is a testament to the pivotal role data is playing in reshaping industries and fueling innovation.

Today, the question isn’t whether data holds value, but rather how to effectively tap into this data-driven wealth. As businesses and organizations rush to unlock the potential of data, Snowflake emerges as the leading solution to address their cloud data management challenges.

Let’s explore Snowflake’s data solutions more deeply, analyze its data sharing options and capabilities, and discover how entities across various industries can harness the same. We’ll also unveil how Snowflake is revolutionizing data sharing for enterprises with its integrated tool packages.

Snowflake’s Data Sharing Capabilities: A Game Changer for Data Monetization

At the heart of Snowflake’s capabilities is a feature that has revolutionized traditional data sharing, enabling organizations to build many transformative solutions.

Users can seamlessly share and utilize data across Snowflake accounts, which promotes collaboration and enhances efficiency across diverse teams. Its foundational architecture eliminates the need to duplicate data and physically relocate it, paving the way for efficient cloud data management.

How Does Snowflake Data Sharing Power Data Monetization Capabilities?

Snowflake’s data sharing capabilities streamline the process of granting selective data access, making it easier to manage who has permission to access datasets. This approach offers several advantages over traditional data sharing methods. The shared data is set to read-only, ensuring a high level of security and reliability, which is crucial for data monetization efforts.

By securely sharing data with external parties via secure URLs, organizations can unlock new revenue streams through data monetization initiatives. This precise control over data access not only safeguards sensitive information but also facilitates the strategic sharing of valuable data assets, enabling organizations to extract maximum value while minimizing risk.

Snowflake Data Sharing vs. Traditional Methods

To understand the challenges that Snowflake resolves with its data sharing capabilities, it’s best to begin by comparing Snowflake’s capabilities to the old-fashioned way of sharing data.

Let’s take a look:

How Does Snowflake Data Sharing Work?

Snowflake’s advanced data sharing features empower secure collaboration among diverse groups through the innovative concept of ‘virtual data sharing’, eliminating the need for physical data duplication.

In the Snowflake ecosystem, a central Snowflake account serves as the authoritative source, orchestrating access to distinct data segments for both internal organizational units and external partners. This control encompasses individual rows (individual records) and columns (attributes), ensuring a granular data-sharing environment.

Recipients, or ‘Consumers’, can analyze the shared data without disturbing it, ultimately preserving data integrity and fostering teamwork. Snowflake also allows external data sharing through secure links with time-based access, benefiting multiple business purposes.

Snowflake facilitates secure data sharing between organizations, offering a convenient method for real-time, read-only data sharing without manual duplication. Users can effortlessly create data shares—a feature or mechanism that allows users to securely and selectively share specific sets of data with other users—simplifying sharing, enhancing collaboration, and ensuring robust security and compliance.

Snowflake Data Sharing Options for Seamless Monetization

Snowflake offers a versatile range of data sharing options. Some of the options through which you can share data are listed below.

• Direct Share: Through this feature, you can share precise database components, known as a ‘Share,’ directly with another account in your region. This provides a focused and efficient method for sharing specific data.
• Data Marketplace: This entails presenting a ‘Share’ along with additional metadata as a data product to multiple accounts, providing a method to distribute data resources more widely.
• Data Exchange: This involves creating and managing a group of accounts and subsequently granting a ‘Share’ to this designated group. It provides a controlled method for sharing data resources among a predefined set of entities.

Let’s make a comparison between them:

Enabling Data Sharing for Data Consumers with No Snowflake Account

• Reader accounts allow data providers to share data with customers, eliminating the need for these consumers to have their own Snowflake account.
• A reader account, designed for querying data, does not permit data manipulation operations like inserting, updating, or deleting data.
• Reader accounts will not be able to access the underlying data in the provider account. The reader account will only be able to see the data that is shared.
• A Reader account is offered secure and cost-effective data sharing with a quick setup process, while the limitations are – no data modification, restricted data access, and a monthly credit consumption is billed to the provider account.

What Does Snowflake Data Sharing Enable?

Snowflake data solutions and sharing features empower industries with efficient and secure data sharing, fostering innovation, and informed decision-making.

Apart from data monetization, these capabilities include collaborative features for analytics, integration with business intelligence dashboards, compliance with regulations, simplified sharing of market insights, promoting cross-departmental collaboration, providing geographical expansion insights, and more.

From an industry standpoint, Snowflake data sharing features help in optimizing media and entertainment content, enhancing financial services, streamlining supply chains, and enabling coordinated emergency responses, and so on.

• Enhance Business Collaborations: Seamlessly share real-time data, services, and applications with partners and vendors to streamline operations, fostering stronger partnerships and facilitating quicker decision-making processes.
• Unlock Insights Across Data Silos: Break down data barriers between business units and regulatory requirements for comprehensive insights, enabling cross-functional teams to collaborate effectively and make data-driven decisions.
• Transform Products & Services: Upgrade your products/services to elevate value and enhance customer satisfaction by leveraging shared data insights to tailor offerings to meet evolving market demands and customer preferences.

Hexaware’s Use Cases for Snowflake Data Sharing

For Hexaware’s Cloud Data Management Solutions, we harness Snowflake’s robust data exchange and data sharing capabilities to seamlessly send and receive data for clients.

Insurance: Use case that demonstrates the integration of Snowflake data sharing capabilities and Hexaware’s solutions to develop an advanced predictive analytics model for forecasting claim volumes.

‘Streamset’ plays a pivotal role in extracting data from Snowflake and delivering it to client-specific folders, where it is further enriched with supplementary information from Snowflake’s data marketplace, incorporating essential weather and geographical data. We have created a powerful machine learning (ML) model that leverages this enriched dataset to predict claim volumes based on a combination of weather, geographical, and census data.

Using Streamset, the ML model’s output is seamlessly loaded back into Snowflake, and the insights are securely shared with our clients through the Snowflake Data Sharing feature.

To ensure data integrity and compliance, we rely on Snowflake’s built-in features for archival and backup. Furthermore, Hexaware implements a common consumption layer, enabling our clients to self-analyze the results from our model and the input data, empowering them to make informed decisions based on this wealth of the information generated.

Data Monetization with Hexaware’s Snowflake Implementations

To summarize, Snowflake data solutions and data sharing features transforms how data can be utilized by companies, with data monetization being an important capability differentiating leaders in volatile markets.

Hexaware is one of the few Snowflake partners with access to newly launched features such as private preview mode, which provides users with insights on their data transformations. We serve a diverse portfolio of over 30+ customers, including prestigious accounts such as a prominent healthcare companies, global insurance providers, leading technology companies, and numerous others.

To learn more about how Hexaware accelerates your data journey with the Snowflake platform, reach out to us at marketing@hexaware.com.