In a move to help telcos monetize data and improve operational efficiency, Snowflake extended its Data Cloud capabilities to the telecom industry.

The launch of the Telecom Data Cloud comes ahead of Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2023 and is built around three core elements. Firstly, Snowflake is bringing its data and application marketplace to telecom service providers, in order to help them monetize their data and applications. Secondly, the Telecom Data Cloud platform offers an ecosystem that includes telecom-centric partners, allowing service providers to have a unified data approach across all their clouds with unified governance and management and an emphasis on security and privacy. Finally, as service providers evolve to 5G and beyond technologies, Snowflake aims to support artificial intelligence and data-driven services, according to Snowflake Telecom Industry Lead Phil Kippen.

Snowflake introduced the concept of the Data Cloud in 2020, which is an ecosystem of partners, customers, data providers, and data service providers that can share data through the platform using a cloud-based architecture offered through an as-a-service model. This allows enterprise customers to analyze data stored in a central repository using business intelligence tools or other analytics applications and supports the three largest public clouds — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

With Telecom Data Cloud, the company added more industry-specific data, and partners, along with the marketplace. Kippen noted that no shift is required for telecom service providers who are already on the Snowflake platform, and cited examples such as AT&T, Globe Telecom, and OneWeb, who are already leveraging the Telecom Data Cloud for performance monitoring, generating insights to improve customer experience, monetizing data services, and marketing and advertising.

The Telecom Data Cloud is designed to enable telecom companies to create more personalized data and application services with Snowflake Marketplace, the company claims.

“Service providers are in a unique place, right? They see more data than any single social media platform today,” Kippen said. “And with respect to personalization, customer expectations are changing, and subscribers want a more personalized experience.”

Snowflake’s platform is designed to offer the behavior and data visibility for service providers to tailor their packages to align with customers’ needs, he added.

On the enterprise side, Kippen noted that companies are dealing with more complex technologies and environments and that the Telecom Data Cloud allows telcos to “proactively” enhance their enterprise services and bring new capabilities.

Snowflake built security, encryption, and compliance capabilities into its platform, which include a unified governance model, a single copy of data, and data masking, Kippen noted.

Additionally, it also integrates with partners including Wiz, Hunters, Panther Labs, and Securonix to deliver security capabilities to Data Cloud customers using connected applications.

The vendor aims to bring these capabilities to telecom service providers to improve their data security and privacy. T-Mobile US, for example, has been hacked several times in recent years.

“The platform sits above the cloud provider,” Kippen said. “Moving your data up into our platform, having that single copy, and then the unified governance capabilities across clouds, there isn't a difference anymore in how you use data or access data or discover data between one cloud provider or another.”

He added that consistency across all clouds and easy-to-use operations can prevent misconfigurations, human mistakes, and data breaches that are caused by inconsistencies.