How do Snowflake domain-specific clouds help industries gain a competitive advantage?

Amid a digitization wave, organizations are producing more data than ever. Industry-specific data insights can help organizations realize higher agility and innovation and avoid redundant efforts and inefficient resource allocation.

On the other hand, industries failing to eliminate data silos find themselves at a distinct disadvantage, unable to harness the collective intelligence of their data to drive growth, competitiveness, and strategic advancement.

Snowflake’s domain-specific clouds (DSCs) enable organizations to leverage millions of domain-specific datasets by unifying them for a single source of truth. For instance, a retailer can use Snowflake Data Cloud to unify data from its e-commerce platform, point-of-sale systems, and supply chain management systems, ensuring a 360-degree customer view for better decision-making and increased revenue.

This article dives into the various aspects of DSCs, capabilities, key features, and how they add value to the manufacturing and financial services sectors.

What is a Snowflake Domain-Specific Cloud? 

Snowflake Domain Specific Clouds (DSCs) allow organizations to build and manage data warehouses and lakes tailored to specific business domains.

Snowflake offers DSCs for various industries, including the financial services, manufacturing, and media industries. They are specifically designed to offer higher performance, compliance, and security. 

Here's how!

• Performance: DSCs deliver high performance for specific workloads. For example, Snowflake's Financial Services DSC is optimized for financial trading and analytics, while Snowflake's Healthcare DSC provides healthcare data warehousing and analytics capabilities.
  
  
• Compliance: DSCs help organizations comply with industry-specific regulations. For example, Snowflake's Financial Services DSC complies with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). At the same time, Snowflake's Healthcare DSC complies with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
  
  
• Security: DSCs offer a high level of security for sensitive data. For example,  Snowflake's Financial Services DSC uses encryption at rest and in transit, while Snowflake's Healthcare DSC uses role-based access control (RBAC) to restrict access to data.

Key Features of Snowflake Domain-Specific Clouds

• Pre-built integrations: Domain-specific Clouds have pre-built integrations with popular third-party applications, such as Salesforce, Oracle, and SAP, which helps organizations save time and effort when connecting to their existing data sources.
  
  
• Certified data: Snowflake partners with leading providers to offer certified data for each domain. This data is pre-loaded into Snowflake and ready for analysis, saving organizations time and money in the data preparation process.
  
  
• Domain-specific expertise: Snowflake employs domain experts who can help organizations with their data strategy, governance, and security to maximize returns and ensure data compliance with industry regulations.
  
  
• Global presence: Snowflake is available in multiple regions globally, which allows organizations to keep their data close to their uses and meet compliance requirements. 

These features are built on top of a fully matured cloud data warehouse solution, which is easy to use, highly scalable, and secure. And can meet most data warehousing requirements with a single tool. It predominantly uses SQL and Snowpark for non-SQL code, providing a wide range of spectrum for the users to leverage.

Snowflake Domain-Specific Cloud and Compliance

Another major advantage of Snowflake's DSCs is that Snowflake incorporates compliance standards to provide organizations with a secure and reliable environment for their data operations.

The compliance features of each DSC vary depending on the industry. For example, the Financial Services DSC is compliant with PCI DSS, SOX, and MiFID II, while the Healthcare DSC is compliant with HIPAA and GDPR.

Compliance standards are crucial for industries as they provide a rules framework and guidelines that organizations must follow to ensure ethical practices, data security, privacy protection, and operational transparency.

These standards help maintain trust among customers, investors, regulators, and the public. Whereas non-compliance can lead to legal penalties, reputational damage, financial losses, and potential business disruptions. 

Snowflake's Manufacturing Data Cloud

Snowflake's Manufacturing Data Cloud provides edge connectivity hardware capable of edge analytics and acts as a robust gateway device. It leverages MQTT-based data ingestion for a secure and scalable communication channel, establishing a strong foundation for data-driven operations.

Challenges facing the manufacturing sector 

By implementing Snowflake's Manufacturing Data Cloud, an organization can realize the following benefits: 

• Seamless Integration: It facilitates harmonious data integration between IT and operational systems.
  
  
• Predictive Analytics: It empowers predictive analytics by merging historical time series data with core dataset attributes, enabling accurate predictions.
  
  
• Production Optimization: It reduces bottlenecks and increases manufacturing efficiency by merging machine data with core material datasets.
  
  
• OEE Metrics Analysis: Snowflake's capabilities extend to analyzing Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) metrics and streamlining production processes.

  
A leading agro-industrial food production and distribution conglomerate in Africa and the Middle East Region leveraged the manufacturing DSC to build a centralized data platform to integrate disparate data from multiple entities and leverage it for insights.

Nagarro built a cloud-based centralized data analytics platform using Snowflake that delivered actionable insights at the group level and established a single source of truth for data analytics. It helped the organization track the data gaps and improve the data quality in the system ensuring increased data accuracy and value of the insights.

Snowflake's Financial Services Data Cloud

Snowflake's Financial Services Data Cloud gives organizations access to specialized solutions provided by its collaborative partner network and the expanding reservoir of financially pertinent data accessible within Snowflake's Data Cloud.

Challenges facing the finance sector

By implementing Snowflake's Financial Services Data Cloud, an organization can realize the following benefits: 

• Quantitative trading: Snowflake allows storing and analyzing vast data volumes to power quantitative trading. It supports the storage of historical data, and its scalability and performance make it ideal for high-volume and real-time data analysis.
  
  
• Risk management:  It minimizes financial risk by consolidating data from various sources and leveraging it for data engineering and machine learning. This further helps detect and avoid fraud and enhances due diligence by supporting KYC processes.
  
  
• Regulatory compliance: The single data platform allows seamless data access and secure data sharing enabling analytics and compliance with geo-specific regulations.
  
  
• Fraud detection: By leveraging ML models, Snowflake helps combat fraudulent claims with risk analytics, anomaly detection, and pattern recognition.
  
  
• Customer analytics: Snowflake can store and analyze customer data for customer analytics purposes, such as customer demographics, purchase history, and social media data. Snowflake's scalability and performance make it ideal for large-scale data analysis. Enable personalized investment planning and product suitability with predictive customer 360 analytics that leverage data access and sharing.
  
  

One of the largest commodity brokerage firms in the world recently leveraged Snowflake’s DSC for the financial sector to integrate data from different sources and enable faster insights with interactive dashboards on current and historical data.

As the technology partner, Nagarro built a scalable system based on Snowflake and Power BI to help the client gain an automated view of customer interactions. An interactive dashboard eliminated manual reporting, enabled risk mitigation, and uncovered hidden opportunities by delivering crucial business insights.

A starter guide on Snowflake DSCs

While Snowflake DSCs offer multiple benefits, it is prudent to remember that they may not be as flexible as a general-purpose cloud platform. This can be a problem if the organization changes its domain or uses different cloud services for different domains.

They are usually pricier than the other cloud platforms as they require specialized hardware and software. And are only offered by a single vendor, leading to vendor lock-ins.

However, the benefits far outweigh the limitations when realizing the full value of domain-specific data. To help maximize your RoI for DSCs, you can work with a tech partner who helps you assess the organizational needs and develop a plan for setting up a Snowflake domain-specific cloud.

They can also help you migrate your data to Snowflake and develop custom applications to exploit its capabilities. Besides consulting, you can also lean on your tech partner for support in managed services, optimizing snowflake workloads, and training and support.