The total cloud computing market worldwide is expected to reach $623.3 billion by 2023. Much of this growth will go toward the public cloud. The reason is simple: it can address complex processes while offering global availability, agility, elasticity, flexibility, and a reduced total cost of ownership. At a basic level, public cloud computing offers compute, storage, and networking – and every data environment requires all of these to perform well.

Consider a public cloud’s applicability to the financial sector. Global financial-services companies process millions of financial payment transactions daily, many across borders. Data-sovereignty regulations have introduced more complexity requiring some data to be managed and stored inland. Yet aggregated data can be utilized for global organization-level decision making, IPs, or value-added services like fraud modeling.

How can global financial-services companies localize data to comply with country-specific regulations while accessing and analyzing their valuable global data? The appropriate technology measures can help them remain compliant, while the right cloud solution can address both of these business demands.

Unleash data with public cloud

Snowflake Data Cloud is a global network where thousands of organizations mobilize data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. Snowflake’s platform is the engine that powers and provides access to the Data Cloud. The platform is built to utilize public clouds. The architecture separates data storage from data computing offering elastic scaling, usage-based per-second billing, and secure data sharing over a multi-cloud deployment. Snowflake’s true separation of compute and storage, along with engineering for the service layer, enables it to serve Data Warehouse, Big Data, Reporting, and Analytics applications over a public cloud.

Public cloud natively lets organizations host data locally within a country, with security features that ensure compliance with local and international regulations. In addition to data localization, the Snowflake platform takes advantage of public-cloud capabilities and architecture to solve the complex processing and data-access issues like those described in the financial services example above. Snowflake can deliver these capabilities due to a layered architecture with three distinct components:

1.     Snowflake virtual warehouse

Snowflake virtual warehouses do not host data, but leverage a copy of data stored centrally for computing applications. This is key in separating data storage from data consumption. Each virtual warehouse performs its own computing without impacting others while accessing the same version of centrally stored data. And Snowflake virtual warehouses use public cloud compute infrastructure like AWS EC2, offering unlimited elasticity.

2.     Snowflake storage

The Snowflake storage layer manages data centrally in a public cloud storage infrastructure like AWS S3 or Azure Blob. This layer offers data encryption, in motion and at rest, and it is not directly accessible to anyone. The data access is only offered via virtual warehouses.

3.     Snowflake service layer

The Snowflake service layer is most critical, as it is a single point of entry to the Snowflake system. It manages a complete system; captures metadata automatically; and performs service control, authentication, and authorization. The other two layers are governed and made available through this service layer, which is also responsible for features like data sharing.

Snowflake offers several advantages for companies looking to leverage the public cloud:

• It supports a growing list of regions across the globe on Azure, AWS, and GCP.
• Its architecture’s separation of data storage and data processing via virtual warehouses helps organizations comply with data-localization regulations. The architecture also facilitates strong data security and privacy.
• The cloud-services layer with required metadata promotes stronger governance and provides adherence to stringent data-security and privacy requirements.
• Different data-sharing features enable sharing across multiple cloud providers and different regions. Fine-grain control in the hands of data providers ensures compliance with evolving complex localization regulations.

Snowflake solution architecture for global payments

This high-level architecture strategy shows how Snowflake could be applied to address the data needs of a global financial services company. The Snowflake architecture opens the broader possibility of data sharing and monetization across partners, as both data providers and consumers, while ensuring that local regulations are followed.

With a Snowflake deployment, this architecture requires only configuration – no other complex engineering, architecture, or solution development. Best of all, it could be operational in a matter of days with continuous industry-leading data security. Deploying a solution with traditional data technologies would require many months of engineering.

Wipro-Snowflake partnership

Wipro is an “Elite” global SI partner for Snowflake in cloud data warehouse services. Wipro offers a variety of services for the Snowflake data platform from architecture consulting, implementation, and migration to support. Wipro leverages the 500+ Snowflake consultant pool that includes more than 120 Snowflake-certified consultants. Wipro was named a Global Solution Partner for 2018 and 2019 with more than 35 implementations and the privilege to build connectors for Snowflake Mainframe and SAP BW.

Looking for more information? Reach out to us at ask.analytics@wipro.com