We simplify and expedite your Snowflake enablement to the Snowflake Data Cloud architecture. Whether your cloud provider is Azure, AWS, or GCP, our experts will successfully get you up and running, and ensure every aspect of your Snowflake infrastructure is covered.
Our Approach
Our Snowflake enablement process typically takes around 1 – 2 weeks to get initially setup. This planning is needed to get all the requirements up front and it ensures your architecture is ready to handle all the operational needs that your organization will require.
Snowflake Enablement phases
Accounts and Organization Strategy
In this phase we will meet with the Platform owner and any Lead Snowflake architects you may have on staff. We will discuss things like how environments are separated and or isolated according to your requirements. Will you house all your environments within one account, or will you plan to separate each out to separate accounts? Will you have a multi-cloud setup or will you have separate accounts in different regions or availability zones? These discussions typically take around 1-2 hours of initial requirements gathering.
Architecture Design
In this phase we start to to document what your planned destination infrastructure is going to look like. What are the main compute structures (warehouses) that you will require? What are the functional roles and access roles that will be needed in your installation to ensure workloads will be distributed optimally and rights are only assigned in one location. How does data flow from source, modeling, and presentation layers of your architecture? What are the technologies you are using, and who will be consuming this data? This phase will require an additional 2-3 hours of requirements gathering.
Automated Resource Provisioning
In this phase we will discuss how we plan to provision users and groups in Snowflake. Will we utilize SCIM for automating the user onboarding process? Will we need Single Signon (SSO), and any MultiFactor Authentication routines etc. For this step, we will need to speak with your CISO and or any security folks you may have on staff.
Network Connectivity Setup
Will you need PrivateLink, or will you need VPN connectivity setup in order to connect to Snowflake? Again we will need to get all of these requirements with you CISO or any security folks you have to ensure all connectivity will be handled appropriately.
Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery
Do you need your data cloud to be highly available? We will discuss the need for setting up failover groups and client redirects to help facilitate your needs in the same cloud provider or multicloud setup.
Reporting Integration
Whether you are using Tableau, PowerBI or some other reporting applications we will setup all the integrations and networking needed to get them to hit your data cloud.
Data Ingestion
Are you using Fivetran, DBT, Databricks, Synapse, or Azure Data Factory? We will need to meet to discuss the different types of ingest processes that need configurations setup.
Data Sharing & Governance
Next we discuss your need to share data between different environments and or accounts. Do we need to perform any data masking or row security requirements.
Privilege Auditing
Some of the items you may need for your Security teams is the ability to Audit Access privileges and roles. We provide various utilities and reports that can be furnished to satisy any needs you may have around those facets.
Operational Reporting
Cost Dashboards around utilization, user acceptance, and day to day operational tasks. Understand the thresholds for when certain levels should warn when certain credits are hit and when should certain warehouses shutdown automatically to prevent excessive spending. We discuss these needs and setup the means to ensure costs do not run amuck.
Platform Monitoring
We finally setup various monitoring alerts and dashboards for handling critical scenarios. These alerts will help keep the support team up to speed when things go bump in the night, or whenever they may occur. We also provide 24/7 support so you can sleep at night knowing your data is always secure and in capable hands.
Ask us about our Snowflake Consulting Services