Correct, consistent data is the lifeblood of the financial services industry. If your data is correct and consistent, it’s valuable. If it’s wrong or inconsistent, it’s useless and may be dangerous to your organization.
I saw this firsthand during the financial meltdown of 2007/08. At that time, I had been working in the industry for nearly 20 years as a platform architect. Financial services companies needed that “single source of truth” more than ever. To remain viable, we needed to consolidate siloed data sets before we could calculate risk exposure. Most financial services companies were on the brink of collapse. Those that survived did so because they had access to the right data.
At my employer, we looked for a way to achieve this single source with in-house resources, but my team and I quickly realized it would be an extraordinary challenge. Multiple data marts were sprawled across the entire enterprise, and multiple sets of the same data existed in different places, so the numbers didn’t add up. In a global financial services company, even a one percent difference can represent billions of dollars and major risk.
We ultimately built an analytics platform powered by a data warehouse. It was a huge a success. It was so successful that everybody wanted to use it for wide-ranging production use cases. However, it couldn’t keep up with demand, and no amount of additional investment would solve that problem.
That’s when I began my quest to find a platform that could provide universal access, true data consistency and unlimited concurrency. And for financial services, it had to be more secure than anything enterprises were already using. I knew the cloud could address most of these needs. However, even with the right leap forward in technical innovation, would the industry accept it as secure? Then I found Snowflake. But my story doesn’t end there.
I knew Snowflake, the company, was onto something. So, I left financial services to join Snowflake and lead its product team. Snowflake represents a cloud-first approach to data warehousing, with a level of security and unlimited concurrency that financial services companies demand.
We’ve since taken that a step further with Virtual Private Snowflake (VPS) – our most secure version of Snowflake. VPS gives each customer a dedicated and managed instance of Snowflake within a separate Amazon Web Services (AWS) Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). In addition, customers get our existing, best-in-class Snowflake security features including end-to-end encryption, at rest and in-transit. VPS also includes Tri-Secret Secure, which combines a customer-provided encryption key, a Snowflake-provided encryption key and user credentials. Together, these features thwart an attempted data decryption attack by instantly rendering data unreadable. Tri-Secret Secure also includes user credentials to authenticate approved users.
VPS is more secure than any on-premises solution and provides unlimited access to a single source of data without degrading performance. This means financial services companies don’t have to look at the cloud as a compromise between security and performance.
To find out more, read our VPS white paper and solution brief: Snowflake for Sensitive Data.