Spreems Partners with Alation and Snowflake to Accelerate Data Modernization

For competitive enterprises, the cloud is the future of data management. In fact, Gartner predicts that “worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 20.4% to total $678.8 billion in 2024.” Yet Gartner has also found that “83% of all data migration projects fail and that more than 50% of migrations exceed their budget.” This raises an important question: How can savvy IT leaders avoid the failure of a costly and drawn-out cloud migration?

Today, we’re excited to announce a solution. Peak Performance is a new Snowflake Native App built to help organizations optimize their Snowflake usage. Developed with Alation, Peak Performance offers a set of ready-to-use dashboards with reporting features, making it easy for leaders to track cloud data consumption and costs at scale. Leaders have visibility into the consumption data they need to optimize workloads, decommission legacy silos faster, and scale Snowflake usage post-migration.

The Cloud Migration Challenge

Any IT leader who has led an enterprise cloud migration knows it is no easy feat. Those migrating for the first time often struggle with a lack of visibility into the most used (and useful!) data sources. They face security and compliance risks during migration, and operational bottlenecks and downtime as they move. As if managing and shepherding the process of migration and modernization were not a Herculean effort alone, optimizing the cloud instance post-implementation also poses a unique range of challenges. 

New environments require new skills and expertise. New cloud data ecosystems are often rife with inefficient data operations and data integrity and quality issues. This leads to cost management concerns and tough questions from leadership about resource utilization and allocation. To prepare, data leaders need to look into specific consumption metrics to oversee a successful migration: Peak Performance delivers that view.

Peak Performance in Action: From Migration to Optimization

Assess Data and Strategize for Success

You can’t optimize what you can’t see. That’s why the first step in any successful data modernization initiative is to evaluate the current state of your data comprehensively. It is vital to understand where your data is stored, its format, and how (and by whom) it is used. This initial assessment lays the foundation for developing a robust strategy that aligns with your business needs, ensuring that the migration to Snowflake aligns with your overall business objectives and data governance policies.

Seamless Migration and Management

With a strategy set, the focus shifts to migrating data into Snowflake. This phase is critical and involves the technical aspects of moving data and managing the migration status to ensure minimal disruption to business operations. Peak Performance grants leaders visibility into the migration process, helping them to prioritize the most critical data, understand any complications or foreseeable issues faster, and ensure a smooth transition. With complete visibility, leaders can eliminate data silos faster and make data AI-ready in the cloud. 

Adopt and Trust Your Data

With data successfully migrated, the next step is to adopt the right trusted data and deprecate outdated or irrelevant data sets. By deprecating what’s low quality, you can surface your most trusted data and ensure it’s ready for use – by curating, stewarding, and securing data. This phase ensures that your organization works with high-quality, reliable data, setting a solid foundation for data-driven decision-making.

Optimize for Agility and Value

The final step in the data modernization process for your Snowflake data cloud involves optimizing performance and cost. This is where you fine-tune your environment to ensure that it's not just running efficiently but also cost effectively. Optimizing your Snowflake setup can lead to improved business agility, fostering innovation, and driving greater value from your data investments.

Peak Performance Use Case: Enhancing Performance for Real-Time Analytics

How might leaders leverage this Snowflake Native App to solve a pressing problem? Let’s review an example. 

The Challenge

A fintech startup relies heavily on real-time analytics for transaction fraud detection. However, it faces challenges with slow query performance and data processing, which impact its ability to detect and react swiftly to fraudulent activities.

The Solution

Peak Performance offers a comprehensive suite of tools for monitoring and analyzing Snowflake’s performance. With access to its user and query analytics, the fintech startup can identify data bottlenecks and optimize query execution.

How it Works

Peak Performance offers a Snowflake Native App for real-time monitoring, optimization, and performance tuning for data modernization programs

1. Real-Time Monitoring: Peak Performance continuously monitors query performance, identifying and flagging slow-running or inefficient queries.

2. Query Optimization: The dashboard surfaces insights leaders can use to refine and optimize SQL queries, reducing execution times and improving resource utilization.

3. Performance Tuning: IT leaders can adjust computing resources dynamically based on analytics to ensure optimal performance during peak transaction periods.

The Outcome

Query performance is significantly improved, reducing the time to detect and respond to fraudulent transactions (while saving the startup money). The fintech startup can now offer more secure, reliable services, enhancing customer trust and satisfaction.

Who Benefits from Cloud Optimization? 

With a wide range of personas using data in the cloud today, Peak Performance delivers unique benefits across the org chart, including:

• Data Engineers and Architects. They gain a key tool for streamlining data operations, optimizing storage, and improving query performance, which are all crucial for maintaining efficient and cost-effective data infrastructures.

• IT and Operations Managers. They receive detailed insights into resource utilization, system health, and performance metrics, aiding in the proactive management of IT infrastructure to ensure high availability and performance.

• Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and Finance Teams. With detailed cost analysis and optimization features, finance folks can closely monitor and manage the expenses related to Snowflake operations, ensuring alignment with the company’s financial goals.

• Compliance Officers and Security Analysts. By tracking successful and failed logins, as well as query executions, this group can enhance security protocols, ensure data integrity, and maintain compliance with relevant regulations.

• CIOs and CTOs. Senior technology leaders can oversee the entire data estate, making informed strategic decisions regarding technology investments, data governance policies, and digital transformation initiatives. Specialists migrating databases and data warehouses to Snowflake will find dashboard features invaluable for smooth transitions, including migration progress tracking and error tracking.

• Business Professionals. They can leverage the platform to create detailed reports and dashboards, enhancing their ability to communicate insights and influence strategic decisions across the enterprise. Data analysts and scientists can derive actionable insights, recognize patterns, and support data-driven decision-making processes.

Finally, any data leader charged with creating an ecosystem for AI-ready data can leverage Peak Performance to drive high data quality, provide effective data governance and compliance, optimize data operations for cost efficiency, improve data accessibility, enhance operational efficiency, maintain security and privacy, and ensure scalability. Peak Performance enables organizations to create a robust foundation for their AI initiatives by addressing these key areas.

What Is Spreems?

Spreems is an Alation systems integrator partner who modernizes business data infrastructures by integrating, optimizing, and automating data stacks. We enhance enterprise visibility and streamline operations using the Snowflake Data Cloud, offering comprehensive support for advanced data analytics systems. Our expert team empowers partners to make informed decisions, driving growth, productivity, and profitability. Partnering with Spreems gives you access to cutting-edge strategies to unlock your data's full potential.

Get Started Today

With Peak Performance integrated seamlessly into Snowflake through the Native App Marketplace, anyone can easily spin up an environment and begin their data modernization journey. Starting this month, Snowflake customers can draw down their current commitment with help from this tool, which offers database-level analytical insights out of the box. With Snowflake’s elasticity on the back end, teams can scale Peak Performance to meet their growing needs and use fully interactive data visualizations delivered through Streamlit. 

Modernizing your data architecture with Snowflake is a strategic move toward harnessing your data's true potential. With Peak Performance, data leaders can confidently tackle the challenges of cloud migration to drive cost-based optimization and business growth. 

Curious to learn more? Check out the press release for details.