Shift to Snowflake: Optimizing a Commercial Data Warehouse

Companies in the life sciences industry encounter numerous challenges, especially with the vast amount of pharmaceutical data they’re analyzing to gain a holistic view of their patients. These obstacles can be even more prominent when businesses utilize outdated technology or rely on underperforming outside sources.

The Challenge

A Cambridge-based Commercial Biopharmaceutical’s commercial data warehouse (CDW) was controlled and maintained by a vendor who they were dependent on for enhancements, fixes, and requests.

Because this source consolidated data to the Biopharmaceutical’s Amazon Redshift CDW and Tableau but didn’t provide easy access to granular data, the company considered bringing its CDW in-house on Snowflake’s Healthcare & Life Sciences Data Cloud.

How Stratos Consulting Helped

Select Snowflake Services Partner

As a Select Snowflake Services Partner and having previously worked with the Biopharmaceutical company in 2018, Stratos Consulting was engaged once again to determine if Snowflake was the right solution for their long-term data strategy.

Acting as a liaison between the client and Snowflake, Stratos developed a proof of concept (POC):

  • Configured Snowflake and SSO through Okta
  • Migrated a high-volume data set to Snowflake
  • Created Informatica Cloud processes to test data integration from flat files to Snowflake
  • Built Tableau Snowflake data sources for the migrated data sets and conducted performance tests

“Because Stratos Consulting has an in-depth understanding of our environment and the numerous tools we use, they were able to help us navigate through the process, which allowed us to focus on some of our numerous other priorities. Not only do they have such great team expertise and display a high level of technical prowess, they always seem to be evolving and fit well with the nimble IT group we have.” — Head of IT

The Result

Having successfully prototyped Snowflake with the client’s Commercial Data Sets and validated that the platform integrates with AWS, Informatica Cloud, and Tableau, the Biopharmaceutical company could confidently move forward with migrating their commercial data to Snowflake and bringing their CDW in-house.

If data volume, accessibility, accuracy or transparency are challenging your business, talk to a Stratos team member today about our advisory services and getting an assessment for your systems and processes.