With IoT and 5G just starting to make a significant difference across the APAC in terms of data processing requirements, businesses are looking for new ways to use so-called “big data.” Extracting real business value from new data lakes requires a new type of data platform, one that’s engineered from the ground up for a modern hybrid, ever-changing topology.

And the value inherent in data is difficult to unearth, not only because there is so much information through which to sift, but also the physical realities of hybrid networks mean there are always complications when establishing a reliable, secure, multi-cluster, multi-provider IT stack.

Ensuring real agility in business needs a data framework that can respond quickly and securely to needs as they change. Manually provisioning new cloud instances and planning for peak bursts of necessary extra compute and storage (for example) is a difficult job, especially since cloud computing’s arrival has seen the reduction in IT staff levels and budgets.

Manually re-purposing data and applications from the data center to cloud provider A to cloud providers B and C combined, and ensuring reliability and security at all times is a tough call for businesses, and the answer may not be in hiring new talent with the appropriate skills and training. There is a skill shortage in this developing area right across the world, and especially in the Asia-Pacific region.

Rather than suffer from the practicalities of aligning IT with the business’s needs, many companies large and small in the APAC region are using a new cloud data platform from Snowflake. It cuts out the need to granularly administrate and manage multiple providers. The data platform-as-a-service handles all the optimization, infrastructure deployment details, security measures and availability levels.

What’s particularly interesting about the Snowflake offering, however, is that this is not merely a management layer placed over commercial cloud providers’ control panes. While it can and does fully support multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies, its fundamental purpose is to enable business-focused data use. That means the platform is the central element in your data-centric business, a place to build data applications, data exchanges, new warehouses, and pipelines.

Source: Snowflake

From an operational point of view, queries and tasks take less time than conventional hybrid setups, because of the optimized columnar database engine that can automatically cluster resources on-the-fly to speed up resource-heavy tasks, like massive data uploads.

Companies also save, because use is billed on a per-second, use-based basis: in brief, pay for what you use, not for unused capacity you think you might need. That means a hearty goodbye to having to keep clusters of storage and compute idle, or the upfront costs of provisioning for short bursts of activity at peak demand times.

Those lower costs open many doors, of course. They mean that data processing that was once only the arena for companies with bottomless pockets can now be deployed in short order. From the data analyst to the data scientist via the DevOps team, all parts of your enterprise will benefit from this cloud-agnostic platform. Data is optimized and structured on the fly, meaning there’s parity between the petabytes of information flowing from the newest IoT deployments and the “traditional” data creators. Semi-structured data in JSON or XML can be queried in SQL thanks to Snowflakes’ patented methods. And of course, data is loaded and optimized in the background, so there’s less data management required before insights begin to surface.

For development teams, there are standard connectors with which your developers will be cognisant, so whether you already use solutions like Tableau, Talend, or Matillion, or develop your own bespoke analysis solutions, the Snowflake platform is open via JS, Python, ODBC, R, Spark & Node.js.

All over the region, companies are taking advantage of this new range of possibilities that Snowflake is opening up. One such user is Swiggy, India’s premier food delivery service, a company that generates enormous amounts of data in its quest to change the way an entire country eats!

“We have found Snowflake to be an apt choice to handle our Big Data Processing needs without additional overheads on maintaining infra/solution/scale etc. The performance we have seen is incredible. We are able to process terabytes of data daily, with 90% of queries executed in under 100 secs. Additionally, their product road map convinces us that it would continue to be our go-to platform for years to come.”

To learn how you, too, can move, share, and use data to your advantage, get in touch with a local representative today. In business today, journeys don’t start with a single step; they start with data.