Traditional methods of data sharing stall businesses in many ways. Acquiring data from both inside and outside the enterprise for richer analytics is time-consuming, labor intensive, costly and static. In the end, organizations get access to just slices of data integral to streamlining their operations, leading their industries and better serving their customers.
Only a modern, disruptive form of data sharing can provide the fast and efficient process required to deliver live, ready-to-use data across the enterprise and beyond. Groundbreaking technology of this magnitude has many applications. One of them remedies nearly 20 years of frustration that accompanied the benefits that emerged with SaaS.
Data sharing, then and now
At the start of the millennium, businesses began opting for SaaS-based applications over on-premises solutions for a multitude of reasons. The rest is history. Now, a business may have a subscription to a marketing automation platform, one for customer relationship management (CRM), one for enterprise resource planning (ERP) and so on. Despite the obvious benefits of lower initial costs and relief from managing IT infrastructure, SaaS applications provide less access to their customers’ data than on-premises applications.
Why? Customers’ data is no longer in-house because every SaaS application stores a customer’s data in a separate, and therefore disparate, database outside the enterprise.
For example, if company A, B and C use a SaaS application to run marketing campaigns, the marketing automation company acquires volumes of data about how those campaigns perform. However, its business customers only get access to that data in the form of analytics that the SaaS vendor provides. Even more limitations arise because a company also has other, on-premises data that, if combined with its SaaS data, would provide even richer insight than just analyzing their SaaS and on-premises data separately.
A structural breakdown
Without a common infrastructure to support direct access, SaaS business customers get caught in the endless loop of manually requesting data be delivered back to them from the SaaS provider. Then begins the cycle of managing FTP protocols, encrypted files as email attachments or, worse still, manual shipment of data stored on hard disks.
The net result for the business are missed opportunities. To maximize the value of data, a business must access and analyze data in real time. With the limitations imposed by traditional data sharing methods, by the time data arrives to the SaaS business subscriber, its value is diminished because it’s already stale.
Sharing data far and wide without friction
A true, modern data sharing solution must emanate from a cloud-built, multi-tenant data warehouse that separates data storage from the compute layer, acting as a common platform for SaaS business customers to access information from any SaaS provider. This groundbreaking form of data sharing extends the data warehouse to a data sharehouse.
With the storage and compute layers operating independently, new sets of data can be added on-the fly, without disruption to anybody simultaneously running a query against that data set. The new style of data sharing also creates a scenario where the data sharehouse of a SaaS provider can be partitioned and shared (in a read-only format) through a secure and governed channel in a matter of minutes. There is no copying or moving data. This model creates a complete sea change for accessing data.
What the data sharehouse will change
SaaS providers and their business subscribers will easily forge one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many relationships to share and consume data in a myriad of ways. SaaS subscribers will have a richer partnership with their SaaS providers because they will have ready access to their own data.
The data sharehouse will also bolster operational efficiencies because it eliminates the steps required to manually move data around via FTP, email, etc. And, no more data silos. Within the enterprise, data consumers (regardless of geography) will access the same pool of data, so it will be the single source of truth.
Big data, bigger possibilities
All these capabilities combined set a new bar for data sharing. For data management professionals, modern data sharing holds the potential to significantly lighten your load. Rather than constantly managing and moving data around, you’ll be supporting constituents, both internal and external, by providing them with real-time, low granularity data without locking them into your own BI or APIs. Data will always be in the right format. It will always be up to date. It will be secure and governed. No copying and no moving data. What’s most inspiring? We have yet to imagine what organizations will achieve with unfettered access to data.
Sameet Agarwal is vice president of engineering for Snowflake Computing