In today’s economy, cost-saving and efficiency are top of mind for everyone. So, what is the best way to save money with data management costs? What are the best ways to better optimize your Cloud Data Warehouse (CDW) and Customer Data Platform (CDP) Costs? We explore these topics and discuss some cost savings methods.

The Role of Financial Governance for Cost Savings and Modern Financial Governance

What Is Financial Governance? 

Financial governance is the framework of rules that a company uses to manage its financial resources. Financial resources ensure accountability, fairness, and transparency in its financial operations. It encompasses the oversight of all financial activities, including budgeting, financial reporting, risk management, and compliance with regulatory requirements. 

Financial Governance and Data

In today’s “Age of The Cloud”, financial governance refers to the fact that your costs lie in the data you use (including ingestion, storage, etc.) There are positive and negative consequences to this. The upside of this is that you’ll only pay for the data that you use, eliminating unneeded costs. The downside is that it’s difficult to estimate this cost at the onset of the project. After all, data is stored in multiple places, so you can’t just measure one system and call it good. In today’s modern business, data is not just stored on your servers but in multiple places, like Customer Resource Management (CRM) systems, Cloud Data Warehouses (CDWs), and Customer Data Platforms (CDPs). 

So, the better question may be how to centralize your data, and thus limit your costs. Let’s get into it!

The Cost of Storing Data In Your Cloud Data Warehouse (CDW)

Today, many businesses store their data in a CDW thinking they will save money by simply using one system. But making your CDW the heart of all your data storage and activation might not be just costly, but detrimental for customer experience. Here’s why:

• Technical Resource Drain: If you’re planning on having your technical teams manage your CDW, plan on not just building any API pipelines to activate the customer data, but to maintain it. Building this system may cost you unforeseen money and time. If you use your CDW in combination with a packaged CDP, it’ll be faster to set up (and take less technical resources to do so).
• Compute Costs: Queries on large datasets require significant computing power, which increases costs based on how often and how complex the queries are.
• Multiple Data Copies: It is inevitable to have multiple data copies since you will need data to active customer experiences (for example, in Meta to define audiences). You can reduce the volume of copies you have, but you still have to manage some copies so your systems can function. And what is the value of that? You still have to manage a copy!

Ways To Better Optimize Your Cloud Data Warehouse (CDW) and Customer Data Platform (CDP) Costs

Given the previous content of this blog, you might be thinking, “Any method of storing data is costly and hard to manage!” However, it is worthwhile to make a goal to not just optimize your costs, but to make a better customer experience the most important part. After all, you can’t cut costs and expect growth. Don’t just focus on cost-savings, balance it with value creation. Your CDW likely houses mostly technical data- not necessarily data that you can nimbly activate to improve your customer experience. As a result, you’ll want another tool to support you.

The best way to optimize your CDW to provide the best customer experience is to use it in combination with a CDP.  If you combine a CDP and CDW, you are using more data but you get the best of both worlds- deep historical data, and an agile data layer to activate your customer in real-time. We’ve seen the CDW and CDP combination become a trend in successful companies that recognize first-party data importance. 

The Best Customer Data Platform (CDP) To Pair With Your Cloud Data Warehouse (CDW)

When it comes to the best CDP for cost-savings, look for a system like Tealium that helps you with new data, existing data, and your net-new capabilities.

New Data

There are many ways to get data to a CDW, but starting from scratch is difficult and time-intensive for your technical teams. If you do decide to build it yourself, your IT team will likely just use this as a side-project; it isn’t the main focus of their jobs. 

Here at Tealium, we can do this not only better but faster too (and we have proof to back it up). We’re partners with Snowflake and are the first to market for the Snowflake Snowpipe Streaming API, which unlocks the power of low-latency data, complementing Snowflake’s robust data storage and analytics capabilities. That saves you roughly 50-90% of the cost, compared to other methods.

Existing Data

Using a CDP in combination with your CDW can reduce and automate operational data work, freeing time up for more valuable tasks. When you use your CDP in combination with your CDW, you can set up rules to automate the flow of data. This means that you are increasing operational efficiency by removing manual jobs and landing data. 

Plus, with Tealium’s CDP you can reduce the need to enrich your data once it is in your CDW. Here are a few examples:

• Identity Resolution: Tealium does identity resolution at the point of data collection, not after you already have it. 
• Data Cleaning: We clean the data, per your rules; not just after you collect it and decide to clean it.
• Efficiency: We do hashing or encrypting of your data! There is no need for a one-time process or having a technical person come in to do it manually.

New Capabilities

When it comes to evaluating a CDP and CDW, don’t exclusively focus on the cost. Instead, focus on improving your CX, getting a quick Return on Investment (ROI), and unlocking new use cases. With a CDP like Tealium, you can act in real-time (with up to the millisecond context). With real-time capabilities, you can meet customers in the moment for better conversions.