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Supporting the Data Economy

Data is the new oil is an oft-repeated phrase in the Information Age. The mantra, upon first reading, seems to make a lot of sense: data powers innovation, efficiency, and growth, and the volume of data being produced --from cloud data to IoT -- grows expontentially every year. Data impacts almost every area and endeavor, from healthcare and finance to education, government policy, and retail commerce. However, the analogy falls apart a bit on closer examination. The challenge with oil is finding it and extracting it. Once crude oil and surfaced and collected, its refinement and dissemination is pretty straight forward, given the global logisitics and infrastructure capabilities that have been built over the past century. There are no such discovery challenges with data - the challenge lies with refinement and dissemination. The value of the data economy remains unrealized and a high percentage of the data generated in the world today is not being put to beneficial use. Why not?


The Data Economy and the Data Marketplace

One of the primary obstacles to building a robust data economy is the simple fact that data has traditionally been hard to share and trade. There are several reasons why data has been a difficult commodity:

  • Raw data sets often reside in disparate data formats (structured, semi-structured) that do not play well together minus an integrating/unifying process or function
  • Data governance and usage regulations vary from location to location and are undergoing significant change (GDPR, CCPA for example).
  • Data owners across organizations - and often within organizations - deploy different data platforms and models, creating unwiedly data silos that prohibit data dissemenation. 

The result is that data sharing and data commoditization have been too labour and process intensive to catch on in a way that reflects the enormous power of available data. 

Snowflake Powers the Data Economy

Snowflake's unique cloud-built architecture solves these key challenges to help organizations across diverse industries and geographies build and scale the Data Economy.

Snowflake Data Warehouse is built from the ground up for the cloud. It’s designed with a patented new architecture to handle and unify all aspects of data and analytics -- from structured data to semi-structured formats such as JSON.

Snowflake Secure Data Sharing lets customers securely share data in real time without moving data, both within and beyond their organizations. 

Snowflake Marketplace allows data consumers to access and query available data sets and data services to access deep insights and drive informed organizational decisions. It allows data providers to publish data sets or provide data analytics services to Snowflake customers to turn their data into an asset.