Data sharing has become an increasingly important topic in the business world. Traditionally defined as a concept in the world of academic research, data sharing as a technology has become highly relevant for businesses of all sizes, whether they need to disseminate data across a large, global organization or need to augment internal data with broader market data to gain better insights.
Data sharing is distributing the same data resources to multiple users or applications while ensuring data consistency across all entities consuming the data.
Data can originate from the many software applications an enterprise uses during its normal course of business, from website visitor behavior to IoT device signals as diverse as home appliances or power plant sensors. In today's digital world, data sources seem almost infinite, which also means corresponding data volumes are as well.
Until recently, the biggest challenge with data sharing has been moving ever increasing volumes of data. For both internal and third-party sharing, data movement, usually via often resource-intensive extract, transform, load (ETL) processes, has inhibited the wide-scale sharing of data. Maintaining data quality and data governance best practices has also been a challenge.
Data Sharing in the Cloud
Today, modern cloud data sharing is changing the scope of what is possible for data sharing. With cloud data sharing. organizations can enable the following:
Data sharing for business efficiencies: Share live data with internal and external business partners to optimize spend, provide superior customer service, and streamline operations.
Data sharing to eliminate data silos: Create a single source of truth for all internal data and share it with thousands of internal data consumers across hundreds of business units within a single organization.
Data sharing as a product (data provider): Provide direct access to specific data sets as a monetized service for data consumers to augment their existing data.
Data sharing as a product differentiator: SaaS providers can offer direct access to the petabytes of data generated from their B2B customer activity.
To fully leverage data sharing in the cloud, businesses will require a platform with speed, power, governance, security, and ease of use.
Snowflake and Secure Data Sharing
The Snowflake Data Cloud delivers seamless data sharing and data collaboration while reducing costs and revealing new business insights. It allows organizations to securely share data across their business ecosystem. With Snowflake Secure Data Sharing, access live data across the organization, control governed access, and publish data for discovery and controlled access. With Snowflake, organizations can be data consumers, data providers, or both.