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Standardizing analytics with ETL

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85%

reduced

ETL application spend

Faster

onboarding process

for new employees

One

unified

data warehouse environment

About

Cisco Cloud Security provides cloud security infrastructure products that offer a broad range of protection to improve security and simplify management. The business unit provides solutions that deliver unmatched threat protection, assist with compliance considerations, and reduce bandwidth costs.

Company:

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Reporting tech:

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Cisco Cloud Security, a Cisco Business Unit

San Francisco, CA

Cloud Security

Matillion ETL for Snowflake

Data warehouse modernization

Tableau

cisco.com

Challenge

The Business Intelligence team at the Cisco Cloud Security business unit provides automated systems and analytical content that democratize data and help people make better decisions about how to run the business. However, the unit was outgrowing its existing data storage and reporting solutions. The team had been relying on a single database that no longer met its capacity needs. Because the business unit lacked a well-modeled, centralized data repository, each team had to create and maintain its own reporting processes, resulting in fragmented and limited reporting. Plus, its data warehouse solution was unable to integrate with external data visualization tools. With all of these issues, the entire infrastructure was becoming too costly and resource-intensive to support, and the system engineering team was beginning to withdraw support for it. Cisco Cloud Security needed to find a more scalable, flexible, and affordable solution that would meet its increasing data storage and reporting needs.

Solution

After selecting Snowflake as its cloud data platform, Cisco Cloud Security chose Matillion ETL for Snowflake because it met all of its criteria:

  • Matillion is a scalable solution that was created for the enterprise
  • It provides a modular and intuitive graphical user interface tool for ETL processes, which eliminates hand-coding (versus Python and Airflow)
  • Built for Snowflake, Matillion ETL for Snowflake makes it easy for Cisco to take advantage of native Snowflake functionality
  • Matillion provides pre-built connectors that integrate with Cisco’s primary data source systems, including RDS, SFDC, Zuora and S3
  • Matillion ETL allowed the team to automate its data transformation, which reduces the amount of technical support required and allows the Cisco business intelligence (BI) team to focus on its core competencies

Results

  • The data warehouse environment now integrates with numerous data visualization solutions, opening up greater possibilities for extracting insights
  • Accelerates onboarding processes for new employees, because data processes are now standardized in a single data warehouse
  • Unifies previously fragmented reporting processes in a single data warehouse environment

Benefits

With Matillion ETL for Snowflake, Cisco Cloud Security is able to find and use data more easily, and access more detailed data than it could in the past. The solution allows staff to transform raw data into formats that are optimized for loading and analysis. Because Matillion ETL is easy to use, the Business Intelligence team can deploy modeled data sets for reporting and analysis faster. This speed to deployment enables teams to more quickly spot data anomalies, improve data quality, and create more insightful reports. Matillion ETL has also delivered operational improvements via accelerated data extraction processes, along with automated builds and logging.

Lastly, the Business Intelligence team was able to reduce ETL application spend by about 84% by switching from their
previous ETL solution, Informatica, to Matillion. With a costeffective, scalable and resilient data warehouse environment in place, Cisco now has the capacity to meet its future data needs.

Matillion enables our team to provide meaningful data insights quickly. And because it's built for modern cloud data warehouses, we can use native Snowflake functionality to transform our data. Tim McDonough Manager, Business Intelligence| Cisco Cloud Security