The Transformation from Traditional to Smart Data Processing

Every day, we create roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, platforms like snowflake supports data analysis at almost any scale, with the ability to process data from structured and semi-structured sources. As a result, users can compute with any business data or workload, using standard SQL instead of complex programming languages.

We spoke to Vimal Venkatram, Country Manager, Snowflake to understand how snowflake’s platform allows customers to get the most out of their data.

How do Data analytics help banking and other financial services?

Banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) are some of the sectors most heavily invested in data management related technologies. today, financial institutions are compelled to deploy analytics and data-driven capabilities to increase growth and profitability, lower costs, improve efficiencies, drive digital transformation, and support risk and regulatory compliance priorities.

With data analytics, BFSIs can improve customer targeting, risk assessment strategies, as well as provide customised solutions to current customers.

Personalised experience: Personalisation has come to be expected in every bank-customer relationship. With access to a massive volume of consumer data, banks and financial institutions have the opportunity to deliver a specialised experience to customers.

For a personalisation strategy to be successful, it is fundamental to have full visibility into customer interactions in real-time. With the help of cloud platforms, businesses can house all types of data such as clickstream, transactional, and third-party data in one secure place.

Ensuring governance while driving modernisation: The payment system in financial institutions and banks keeps on upgrading to ensure that customers get fast, seamless shopping and checkout experiences. Modernisation is a neverending process. Banks need to understand who has access to critical, sensitive data and where such data was used or downloaded.

Data Security: The Data Cloud enables financial institutions to index all of their cybersecurity, anti-fraud, and machine- and customer-generated data.

It offers automatic and infinite scalability, per-second compute pricing, and low storage costs. this enables companies to affordably store petabytes of data that they can analyse with advanced analytics, detection rules, and enhanced visualisations to prepare for future threats. With this, financial institutions will have higher data security, cost-effective investigations, and earlier detection. these benefits translate to higher consumer confidence and loyalty and lower costs for fraud and cybersecurity mitigation.

How are you managing large sets?

Snowflake’s platform enables organisations to easily unify, integrate, analyse, and share their data within the Data Cloud. Customers use snowflake’s platform to execute critical workloads, including data engineering, data warehousing, data lakes, data science, data sharing, and data applications.

Because snowflake is also ACID compliant, routine data updates and deletions are easy to perform, which in turn simplifies the analytics pipeline. With flexibility, performance, and ease of use, customers will be able to derive more meaningful data insights.

We work with leading data management, data integration, and Business Intelligence (BI) partners so our customers can synthesise and analyse their data more easily and interactively.

Vimal Venkatram, Country Manager, Snowflake

The platform scales instantly and near-infinitely. It enables any organisation to operate across different public clouds and regions as a single cloud while satisfying industry and regional data privacy requirements. It is a single, near-zero maintenance platform, delivered as a service. snowflake’s platform also architecturally scales compute separate from storage to deliver a truly elastic, performant, flexible, and affordable solution.

How do you see the Indian banking and finance sector adopting cloud services?

According to a Nasscom report, organisations within the financial sector have been reaping the benefits of migrating to the cloud. the transformation from traditional to smart banking was the first step towards the adoption of the Data Cloud with enhanced performance and flexibility.

The Backbase-IDC Fintech & Digital Banking 2025 report also states that 70 per cent of the tier-I and tier-II banks in India will regularly access third-party data and insights as they strengthen their efforts around offering personalised customer strategies.

As per an August 2020 Reserve Bank of India report, a total of 8,707 frauds were detected during 2019-20 involving an amount of Rs. 1,85,644 crore. To mitigate this, financial institutions must consider moving to a secure platform to ensure smooth and efficient scanning of crucial data inputs and accurate analysis.

What kind of data security measures do you follow?

Snowflake is committed to the security of our customers and their data. security was baked into snowflake’s platform from the very beginning. Snowflake provides industry-leading features that ensure the highest levels of security for your account and users, as well as all the data you store in snowflake. some of the common security features that we provide in all snowflake editions are:

• End-to-End Encryption means users’ communications are always encrypted and integrated with cloud provider private networking.

• Fully Encrypted Storage which ensures that stored/saved data is always in encrypted form while handled by the snowflake drivers and systems.

• We have a built-in Strong Multi-Factor Authentication system that ensures that the data is safely integrated with the user’s federated SSO and a user-friendly interface.

• At Snowflake, we track every login, transaction, and data transfer. We also send a comprehensive report on all activities to the user’s security tools.

• With our strong data security system and Role-Based Access Control feature, the user can control the data access as per their designation/role in the organisation.

• In case of accidental loss of data or any other unprecedented situation, snowflake provides options to ensure that the data can be recovered.

Additionally, snowflake maintains consumer privacy compliance with built-in security that supports sOC 1 and 2, type 2, and PCI Dss requirements.

The Pandemic has increased cloud adoption, what are your views on that?

Since organisations have become more data-driven in their decision-making, cloud technology has emerged as a front runner for the optimal harnessing of insights from data. According to IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker, India’s Public Cloud services (PCs) market, including infrastructure-as-a-service (Iaas), platform-as-a-service (Paas) solutions, and software-as-a-service (saas) attained $1.6 billion for the first half of 2020. A recent IDC report revealed that the Indian PCs Market is likely to reach $7.4 billion by 2024, with a projected growth rate at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 22.2 per cent for 2020-24.

Organisations in India have realised the benefits of moving to the cloud, with some making full use of their data with the ability to make data-driven decisions. With the cloud, organisations can use their data for new customer acquisition, retain existing customer bases, and achieve greater profitability.