The Data Insights practice at 2nd Watch saw the potential of Snowflake from the time it was a tech-unicorn in 2015. Its innovative approach to storing and aggregating data is a game-changer in the industry! On top of that, Snowflake’s value proposition to their customers complements the data management expertise that 2nd Watch has been developing since its inception. Whether you’re a mid-sized insurance carrier or a Fortune 500 manufacturer, Snowflake and 2nd Watch know how to build scalable, tailored solutions for your business problems.
On top of skills in AI and machine learning, app development, and data visualization, here are the top four data engineering services 2nd Watch uses to deploy a successful cloud data platform initiative using a tool like the Snowflake Data Cloud.
Data Warehousing
Snowflake offers powerful features in the data warehousing space that allow 2nd Watch delivery teams to stay laser-focused on business outcomes. They use innovative technologies that optimize your data for storage, movement, and active use (cloud computing). They also have an ever-increasing array of valuable tools that significantly improve an organization’s ability to enrich and share large amounts of data with other companies.
But it doesn’t happen by magic…
2nd Watch can leverage our vast industry and technical experience to create a data warehouse for your organization that provides a fast, accurate, and consistent view of your data from multiple sources. Using best practices and well-established methodologies, 2nd Watch combines data from different sources into a centralized repository, creating a single version of the truth and a unified view.
The final design contains a user-friendly enterprise data warehouse that connects with both legacy and modern business intelligence tools to help you analyze data across your organization. The data warehouse is optimized for performance, scaling, and ease-of-use by downstream applications.
Potential Deliverables
- Conceptual and physical data models for dimensional and analytical systems
- Deployment of three semantic layers for tracking data in a central hub (raw, business using data vault, and data warehouse optimized for visualizations)
- Design and development of departmental data marts of curated data
- Training of end users for the cloud-based data solution and critical data applications and tools
Data Integration
Snowflake has a lot of flexibility when it comes to the data integration process, meaning Snowflake’s Data Cloud allows companies to go beyond traditional extract, transform, and load data flows. With the Snowflake ecosystem, companies can leverage data integration solutions that do everything from data preparation, migration, movement, and management, all in an automated and scalable way.
The consultants at 2nd Watch will partner with you every step of the way and guide the entire team in the right direction to meet your decision-makers’ specific goals and your organization’s business data needs. These are some of the popular data integration tools and technologies that 2nd Watch can help integrate to Snowflake:
- Azure Data Factory
- AWS Glue and Lambda
- Google Cloud Data Fusion
- Fivetran/HVR
- Etlworks
- IBM DataStage
- SnapLogic
- Plus, all the classics, including SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and Informatica
Potential Deliverables
- Integration of any number of sources to a centralized data hub
- Establishment of a custom system that operates well with niche sources
- Speeding up the ingestion process and increasing the auditing power
- End-game integration to a data warehouse and other target systems
Data Modernization
Snowflake is a paradigm-shifting platform. Micro partition storage, decentralized compute, and cross-cloud sharing opens up new opportunities for companies to solve pain in their analytics processing. Our consultants at 2nd Watch are trained in the latest technologies and have the technical expertise to tackle the challenges posed by making your legacy systems “just work” in modern ecosystems like Snowflake.
Using supplemental tools like dbt or sqlDBM, this process will transform your data platform by eliminating complexities, reducing latency, generating documentation, integrating siloed sources, and unlocking the ability to scale and upgrade your existing data solutions.
Potential Deliverables
- Migration to Snowflake from existing high-maintenance deployments
- Refactoring, redesigning, and performance tuning of data architecture
- Deploying Snowpark API for integrating with Scala or Python applications
- Supporting modern tool selection and integration
Data Governance
Data governance is critical to organizations hoping to achieve and maintain long-term success. Snowflake offers outstanding features such as object tagging or data classification that improve the security, quality, and value of the data. Additionally, when you work with 2nd Watch, we can help your organization establish a data governance council and program.
2nd Watch will assist you in identifying and coaching early adopters and champions. We will help with establishing roles and responsibilities (e.g., business owners, stewards, custodians), as well as creating and documenting principles, policies, processes, and standards. Finally, we will identify the right technology to help automate these processes and improve your data governance maturity level.
Potential Deliverables
- Data governance strategy
- Change management: identification of early adopters and champions
- Master data management implementation
- Data quality: data profiling, cleansing, and standardization
- Data security and compliance (e.g., PII, HIPAA, GRC)
2nd Watch will make sure your team is equipped to make the most of your Snowflake ecosystem and analytics tools, guiding the entire process through deployment of a successful initiative. Get started with our Snowflake Value Accelerator.
