The applications that are crucial to running almost any type of business often face a variety of challenges. Connecting applications and data with IT systems is necessary for keeping your business running successfully. Automation is critical to a variety of modern business processes and functions – having this automation achieved via APIs is becoming an ever increasing popular solution used by IT departments.

Businesses have been adopting more apps over the last decade. The right applications make it easier for them to communicate with customers, analyze data, improve efficiency, and refine their business practices. The number of apps used by businesses jumped incredibly during 2020 as the pandemic made it more difficult or impossible for employees to work from their offices. As organizations rely more heavily on diverse applications, they need reliable API management tools with self-service features.

Snowflake met with Jan Doumen, Head of Expertise for Allianz Benelux, and Naveed Memon, Program Director, Data and Analytics for Emirates, at Data Cloud Summit 2020. Read excerpts from the conversation to learn how capturing data insights in the Data Cloud brings value to their businesses. Data’s value in the 21st century is often compared to oil’s value in the 18th century. It can transform organizations, opening doors to unprecedented opportunities.

Imagine you’re going through immigration at the airport. The immigration officer says, “I don’t need your passport because I trust that you are who you claim to be.” Wait, what? That would never happen, right? That’s because trust is exploitable. Sooner or later, somebody will try to lie about who they are, and thus a criminal could enter the country. That’s why countries must enforce some form of identity, like a passport, to certify travelers are who they claim.

We are living in a time where a difference of a mere couple of seconds can make you lose your business to another company with a faster, more easily accessible web application. In such a highly competitive space, it is important to squeeze out the maximum amount of performance from your application’s software stack and hardware infrastructure.

Democratization of data within an organization is essential to help users derive innovative insights for growth. In a big data environment, traceability of where the data in the data warehouse originated and how it flows through a business is critical. This traceability information is called data lineage. Being able to track, manage, and view data lineage helps you to simplify tracking data errors, forensics, and data dependency identification.

The importance of effective data analytics within an organization is widely accepted by business leaders at this point. With use cases for data analysis spanning every department—from IT management, financial planning, marketing analytics, and so on—the right data analytics tools can have a significant impact on a company’s profitability and growth.

To understand the value of logs—those many digital records of hardware and software events—picture a big puzzle. You put all the pieces together to make sense of them. Every day the modern enterprise generates billions of logs, each capturing a user log-in, application record change, network service interruption—as well as the messages these entities send to one another.

Five differences between Stitch, Talend, and Xplenty: Organizations store data in many destinations, making that data difficult to analyze. Legacy systems, SaaS locations, in-house databases, apps, you name it — by storing data in all kinds of places, companies can complicate data analytics considerably. Storing data in a warehouse or a lake makes more sense.

In order to gain an advantage over their competitors and improve customer experience, organizations of all sizes and industries are using new technologies to undergo digital transformation. According to IT research and advisory firm Gartner, 87 percent of senior business leaders say that digital modernization of their company is a top priority. An emerging theme of many digital transformations relates to ‘application integration’ – but why do these have such a close association?