What Does the Future of Smart Data Integration Look Like?

As pressure mounts on organisations to be more streamlined, profitable and productive in a downturned economy, unlocking the value of data has never been more critical. This theme was particularly evident in the recent Snowflake Data World Tour, which SnapLogic was excited to be a part of in the APAC region as well as in Europe and North America. Here's a quick recap of key learnings and insights from the event.

Unlocking data silos and 'walled gardens'

In order to unlock the true value of data, we need to remove the silos and centralised data from disparate data sources. However, this continues to be a huge problem for enterprises in the current environment where more and more businesses are moving their business online. 

Data integration is critical to the success of organisations today. And yet, according to recent SnapLogic research in partnership with Vanson Bourne, 83% of ITDMs (IT decision-makers) are not completely satisfied with the performance and output of their data management and data warehousing solutions. 

This dissatisfaction stems from issues relating to data formatting, regulations and speed of data movement and accessibility within the organisation. Meanwhile, in scenarios where customer data is fragmented and siloed, it can lead to poor customer experience along with internal operational inefficiencies.

No data integration means no data insights, which leads to impaired decision-making – it's an equation that adds up to adverse business outcomes and poor user experience. In fact, according to Gartner, poor data quality costs organisations an average of AUD $19.4 million every year. 

Organisations must find a better, simpler way to access and analyse their data efficiently – doing so is key to making better data-driven decisions and winning in a saturated market. 

The rise of the Data Cloud

Data is a strategic asset that delivers actionable insights. However, traditional technologies have trapped and siloed data for years, creating limits around how data can be accessed, analysed and shared. Thankfully, four recent technology trends are changing the data landscape: the rise of the cloud, an explosion of data, enhanced data collaboration and analytics diversification. Organisations can unlock the true value of their data with Snowflake's single, integrated platform. 

This ecosystem enables Snowflake partners and customers to derive value from rapidly growing data sets in a secure, governed, compliant and seamless way. By turning data into an actionable asset, companies experience business value in the three areas that matter most: revenue growth, cost savings and risk mitigation. 

To make data actionable, organisations should eliminate data silos, and every user must have safe and controlled access to governed data at all times. This requires a platform that provides a single copy of data in the cloud and enables many workloads. The platform must provide virtually unlimited performance and scalability, be easy to use, and require near-zero maintenance through delivery as a service. 

Snowflake provides a single, integrated platform for all data needs, including data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, data science, data application development and data sharing. Most importantly, Snowflake's architecture underlies and enables the Data Cloud, a federated data network that eliminates data fragmentation and data silos by bringing together application clouds and infrastructure clouds into one ecosystem. 

With its multi-cluster shared data architecture, Snowflake centralises structured and semi-structured data into a single location in the Data Cloud. Users have secure and governed access to data, and organisations are freed from managing the infrastructure. 

Accelerating the pace of change

The enterprises that will win in the data economy are those that can harness data from every source and turn it into powerful insights. With data as the driving force of the future, it's imperative to have an integration platform that can seamlessly integrate, automate and mobilise data to any data warehouse with a simple, powerful solution.

Snaplogic's powerful AI intuitive integration platform allows for customers to accelerate and embrace their cloud adoption journey through:

• Automating mundane integration life cycle tasks.
• Speed of data loading and transformations.
• Simple discovery of internal and external APIs.
• Simplifying discovery of pipeline patterns.

In 2019, SnapLogic expanded its strategic partnership with Snowflake Computing, joining Snowflake's Partner Connect program. For joint customers with Snowflake, SnapLogic offers the flexibility and scalability needed to make the vast amounts of data stored in Snowflake's Data Cloud rapidly available and actionable for all business decision-makers. The connectivity between SnapLogic's 500+ intelligent connectors, called Snaps, provides out-of-the-box integrations into Snowflake's platform via the company's intuitive UI and low-code platform, reducing the burden on IT.

Low/no code solutions benefit entire organisations because they can be used by everyone, regardless of profession. These easy-to-use solutions empower staff to solve complex problems without relying on IT engineers to make sense of the data first. Having that ability and the agility to pivot with technology and respond to challenges swiftly gives enterprises a leg up on the competition now, and for the future.