Business Problem
Thousands of Credit Unions are just now starting to contemplate a cloud journey. Today, the average credit union has about half of its workloads in the cloud, but the majority run on private rather than public cloud which limits the cost-savings and benefits. For credit unions that have made no move to the cloud, investments in legacy systems and the difficulty transitioning to the cloud may be an additional roadblock. Credit Unions face some unique challenges that can complicate their desired move to the cloud, including:
Lack of Cloud Experience
The deep technical experiences developed by data engineers, data architects, and DBAs often are centered around infrastructure and applications that are on-premises or hosted in a private cloud. For many of these professionals, public cloud skill sets are in the nascent stages of development. Cloud competencies are a critical capability for success and existing personnel must either acquire them or hire them, both of which take time.
Data Governance Immaturity
In the absence of any significant cloud initiatives, data governance processes by default were an exercise of access controls to applications that sat over siloed data stores. As a result, the data governance function at Credit Unions is typically a newly created executive role tasked with getting process, people, and solutions in place to effectively handle sensitive workloads migrating to the cloud, and to do so in a compliant, secure, and responsible manner.
Newer InfoSec Posture
For many credit unions, the CISO function may be a recent addition, and exist as a fractional one. Given the highly-regulated environment credit unions operate within, they must comply with multiple security frameworks, including the FFIEC CAT, which follows a standard NIST framework. Navigating these frameworks and remaining compliant requires new tools, skills, and a refined focus for the entire InfoSec function.
The Opportunity
Notwithstanding the challenges credit unions face setting forth on a cloud journey, the business value that can be unlocked by moving to the cloud is profound. Pressure in the market continues to mount for credit unions to deliver enhanced and more relevant digital and physical interactions with their members. This in turn, is driving huge dependencies on data from source systems, which must be accessible in a very timely manner.
- High Value Workload - Most credit unions initially target their daily “core data dump” for migration to the cloud. This workload typically lives in an on-prem or private cloud SQL data store and likely has multiple BI tools attached to it for running daily reports and facilitating analysis. All of which make this workload a prime candidate for using the ALTR + Matillion solution to securely migrate it onto a cloud-based data warehouse like Snowflake.
- Accelerate Time to Insight - Because of how credit unions manage their EDW today, the time to insights can be weeks versus minutes. A Chief Data Officer of a $1.6B CU recently said he must submit a ticket for each data request. A typical request can take up to 10 days before its fulfilled. The ALTR + Matillion + Snowflake solution removes massive amounts of time and effort required to make data available directly to users, in a compliant, secure, and well governed way.
- Culture of Innovation - The capacity for innovation at most credit unions has reached the limits of the “on premises” and “private cloud” worlds. In order to attract and retain top rated talent, credit unions must embrace innovation in their culture. The next generation of credit union leaders for will come from the ranks of those who led strategic initiatives, including the journey to the Cloud.
Business Outcomes
Matillion and ALTR address a critical need in the market — securely migrating sensitive data from on-premises data stores to the cloud. Together we help enterprises fulfill their digital transformation projects more quickly and seamlessly by enabling them to stay compliant with privacy, governance, and security regulations. Realized through an open-source connector, credit unions can easily leverage the combined power of ALTR and Matillion and fully unlock the value of sensitive data in Snowflake to deliver profoundly successful business outcomes.
Rapid Time-to-Value with Low Total Cost of Ownership
ALTR’s cloud-native integration with Snowflake is available immediately to any Snowflake customer through Partner Connect and getting started is as easy as signing up. ALTR’s open source connector with Matillion means ALTR’s powerful data classification, policy automation engine, and tokenization-as-a-service can all be fully orchestrated directly from within a Matillion shared job. ALTR and Matillion were purpose built for the cloud environment, which mean no appliances, no hardware, and no heavy professional services lift to get up and going.
Unparalleled Data Governance, Security, & Compliance
No other combined solution exists in the market today whereby users can easily orchestrate classification, tagging, automated policy, and tokenization of workloads within an ETL pipeline, such that sensitive data lands in Snowflake securely and with active data governance in place. Further, the ALTR + Matillion shared job enables data governance, security, and privacy further upstream in the data lifecycle, making the data pipeline itself fully compliant with regulatory frameworks like the FFIEC CAT. ALTR’s active security and advanced data protection delivers altogether new alerts and signals that can be readily consumed by the existing InfoSec stack at any credit union—giving security professionals a real-time view into how sensitive data is being consumed and active controls to stop any out-of-policy requests for data from Snowflake before they can even execute.
Simplicity, Ease of Use, and Automation at Scale
ALTR’s design principles of API-first and highly available SaaS make it supremely easy to use at scale. With a full management API underpinning the ALTR product, it can easily be integrated into any existing environment’s workflows. For large scale environments, with complex role hierarchies and extensive policy requirements, ALTR can easily automate policy orchestration, even for non-technical users. Interoperability with best-in-class solutions in the broader data ecosystem is made possible by a growing library of open-source connectors. These connectors remove the complexity typically involved with policy orchestration and give you the flexibility to operationalize the data governance function wherever its most appropriate within your credit union. This means your journey to the cloud will be faster, more efficient, and ultimately, far more successful.