Eneco is a producer and supplier of natural gas, electricity, and heat, serving more than two million business and residential customers in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The company has an ambitious goal to get to climate neutrality by 2035, and one of the IT team’s main initiatives is to deliver the right data to achieve this objective.
A few years ago, Eneco’s IT landscape was very fragmented. The IT team had to manage multiple data warehouses from Oracle, SQL Server, Azure, and other legacy systems that had been acquired over the years. Each warehouse had different specifications that the team needed to manage. The main data warehouse wasn’t capable of handling the massive volumes of data or semi-structured data produced. The team had to make subsets of the data and build ETL processes to move the data sets to different data warehouses as needed. Efforts were sometimes duplicated when teams couldn’t easily find an existing data set.
Additionally, with parts of the IT system on premises, the team had limited compute capacity and a lack of scalability. On high-use days, multiple business units had to compete for resources, leading to arguments, delayed projects, and challenges with service-level agreements. The IT team spent an inordinate amount of time and expense on maintenance, upgrades, and database administration, resulting in a lot of wasted time and resources that didn’t add value.
To solve these challenges, Eneco’s IT team sought a cloud-based data solution that could eradicate the numerous data silos and enable the company to become data-driven in its decision-making. The company chose Snowflake for its SQL and Python capabilities, and for its ease of use as a fully managed service. The migration process prioritized enabling the global workforce to access siloed data.
Now, Eneco’s data is stored in a single secure, governed repository and available to all users. Data sharing has become seamless, available with only a few mouse clicks instead of requiring ETL or lengthy sessions and documents. Users can access raw data as well as managed data sets, and administrators can use security features such as Dynamic Data Masking and end-to-end encryption. There’s no longer resource contention between departments, as each unit now has its own compute engine. With a single source of truth, hundreds of end users are building their own data sets on a daily basis to meet their needs. The performance of the new system is better with jobs running concurrently. And the IT team, no longer saddled with mundane data management tasks, can instead focus on projects that drive real business value.
Eneco has around 100 sources of semi-structured and structured data within the Snowflake Data Cloud (the company plans to add unstructured data soon). From there, IT teams can make selected data available to other teams and business units, while ensuring sensitive data is well protected from unauthorized users. Business units can build their own reports and perform self-service analytics. The team is also employing data science and machine learning to glean deeper insights from the data—something that was not possible with their previous mix of vendors.
By modernizing its data stack with Snowflake, Eneco empowers its global workforce to use data to make truly data-driven decisions. For more information on Eneco’s migration story, tune in to our webcast, Let’s Talk Cloud Migrations: Snowflake Customers and Experts Share Strategies for Success When Migrating to the Data Cloud.
