21 August 2017

Data providers do not incur a cost for sharing, and consumers only pay for the compute resources they use for the data shared with them.

Snowflake Computing says it’s come up with technology that turns a modern data warehouse into a data “sharehouse”. According to the US-based firm, until recent years, enterprises could focus only on storing and analysing data generated inside their organisations. Then the internet, social networking, mobile computing and the IoT caused a surge in the volume, variety and velocity of available data. Unfortunately, technical and business limitations forced enterprises to focus on just a subset of that data, says the company.

Snowflake Data Sharing is said to enable businesses of any size to share their live, ready-to-use structured and semi-structured data, and consume the same types of data from other enterprises. Snowflake says that by using simple commands, an enterprise can share or acquire live and secure read-only access to any part of a data warehouse with and from other companies. 

The firm claims its technology uniquely combines the power of data warehousing, flexibility of Big Data platforms, elasticity of the cloud, and live data sharing at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions. Amazon Web Services is the company’s infrastructure partner. 

Among the benefits of data sharing, Snowflake says users gain direct and simple access to live data without the “intermediate, complex and delaying steps of outdated data sharing methods such as email, FTP, EDI and APIs”. Enterprises are also said to benefit from a complete cloud sharing environment that eliminates the need and cost to store another enterprise’s data.

The firm adds that no extra cost, copying or movement of data is required with its data sharing platform, and that the business agreements for sharing are between the providers and consumers with no involvement from Snowflake.