Rise of the Data Cloud

This is a ZE Global Tech Summit Recap Blog.

Kent Graziano’s presentation dealt with the emergence of the “data cloud”, the system in which data is held remotely but at the same time, easily accessible to organizations and individuals.

The data cloud “removes the need for data pipelines and copying data, and resolves differences, even between the security protocols across the different clouds; this really is going to simplify data sharing for everyone.”

The proliferation of data has led to datasets being held in different “silos”, either in physical storage or in the cloud. “Warehousing” data in these silos can prevent organizations from becoming properly data-driven.

At the same time, the emergence of a separate “application” cloud means that data and the applications that process it are often separated, and different departments do not always see the same datasets.

The “data cloud” is in essence a new cloud that seamlessly complements both of these clouds and creates frictionless, but still governed, access to data.

Graziano presented Snowflake’s platform that is “built for the cloud architecture, enabling organizations to work on common data for a wide range of workloads with the performance scale needed to support their business analytic needs.”

Users can share their datasets with any other user, either internally within an organization or externally, through a data marketplace, while always retaining control over the data, he said.

Snowflake’s data cloud is underpinning cooperative efforts to learn more about the Covid-19 pandemic: it’s helping companies plan their operations amid local restrictions, and governments are using it to monitor the effect of Covid-19 and respond to local spikes in case numbers.

“Organizations that embrace the data cloud [will] be rewarded with opportunities and find new ways to enhance customer and stakeholder value, develop a lasting partnership with their peers, [overcome] the toughest business challenges and really become data leaders,” Graziano said.