There are many benefits of using a cloud-based data warehouse, and the market for cloud-based data warehouses is growing as organizations realize the value of making the switch from an on-premises data warehouse.

Apart from the obvious benefit of not needing to buy expensive physical hardware, cloud-based solutions are typically quicker to set up, can easily scale to your capacity needs, and are less expensive thanks to pay-as-you go pricing.

Cloud-based data warehouses can also perform complex analytical queries much faster due to the use of massively parallel processing (MPP), which uses multiple processors—each with its own operating system and memory—to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations.

There are plenty of cloud-based warehouses to choose from, but one popular option is Snowflake, which offers per-second pricing and can store both structured and semi-structured data, converting it into a usable format compatible with SQL. Unlike shared-storage architectures that tie storage and compute together, Snowflake enables automatic scaling of storage, analytics or workgroup resources for any job.

Organizations can derive additional value from Snowflake by running it as a service on Microsoft Azure. Pairing Snowflake with Microsoft Azure has so many advantages that we believe it creates the ultimate “value blizzard.” What’s in this value blizzard?

The top 4 benefits of using Snowflake and Microsoft Azure

  1. Universal data fabric: With the explosive growth of data in all different forms—structured, semi-structured and unstructured—there is a need to work with massive amounts of data, mine it, and make it easily accessible so one can gather intelligence and analytics out of it. Data fabric is a unified platform that provides a way to manage the integration of data from anywhere, anytime within a single platform. It operates as a consistent data management framework to manage, move and protect data across disparate sources. Microsoft Azure Data Lake provides a way to store the data, and Snowflake acts as the data fabric in your journey.
  2. Enhanced business intelligence: With Power BI Premium, you can easily create powerful interactive reports and dashboards so users can enjoy consistent, high-fidelity experiences across devices. Quickly and easily provide customer-facing reports, dashboards and analytics while also reducing developer resources by automating the monitoring, management and deployment of analytics. With hundreds of visuals to choose from, and features from basic reporting to advanced analytics, you dictate how to deliver analytics to your users.
  3. Accelerated data science: You can reduce the time spent preparing and cleaning data thanks to Azure’s Databricks and Machine Learning. Prepare data at unprecedented speed in Databricks, and directly store clean data sets in Snowflake for greater discoverability and scale. There is a built-in connector that allows you to seamlessly read from and write data to Snowflake. Databricks supports Python, Scala, R, Java and SQL, and data science frameworks and libraries including TensorFlow, PyTorch, and scikit-learn. Azure also provides the latest versions of Apache Spark and allows you to seamlessly integrate with open-source libraries.
  4. Accessible AI: By using Azure’s Cognitive Services, you can use artificial intelligence to solve business problems without the need for a team of data scientists. Cognitive Services includes a comprehensive family of AI services and cognitive APIs to help you build intelligent apps, recommendation engines and digital assistants. The catalog of services is categorized into five main pillars: vision, speech, language, web search, and decision.

Sirius provides a wide array of full production data and analytics cloud implementation services when you’re ready to make a move to the cloud, and we provide ongoing support, maintenance, and retainer-based work authorizations through our Data & Analytics Cloud Managed Services.

Whether you simply want to take a tour of relevant cloud technologies or are ready to get started on your transition roadmap, we can help. To learn more, contact us for more information or email me at tom.williams@siriuscom.com.