Transforming Snowflake Spend: A Global Healthcare Leader's Journey to Cost Efficiency with Lightbeam
A global leader in healthcare and life sciences intelligence, analytics, and clinical research services faced mounting Snowflake cloud costs despite its powerful data platform. They wanted to reduce Snowflake spending through intelligent optimization, starting with one instance and replicating success across their vast network. The goal was to boost performance and cut costs without hindering innovation.
Client Snapshot
The customer is a global leader in healthcare and life sciences, specializing in intelligence, analytics, and clinical research services and a premier Contract Research Organization (CRO) and healthcare data powerhouse. With $15.4 billion in revenue (2024) and 88,000 global employees, they span North America, EMEA, and Asia. Their strength lies in 1.2 billion de-identified patient records, driving real-world evidence and powering cutting-edge SaaS platforms for CRM, data analytics, and AI/ML insights.
Challenge
The organization urgently needed to optimize its Snowflake cloud spend, focusing on efficient queries, right-sized warehouses, and minimal byte spillage. They needed a unified view across Snowflake instances to enable drill-down analysis based on tags and product hierarchies, while addressing challenges like complex data models, regulatory audits, and workload optimization using Snowflake Cortex. By bridging the gap between healthcare domain knowledge and advanced AI/data engineering skills, the solution automated query optimization, ensured regulatory compliance, and delivered improved efficiency, enhanced insights, and cost savings.
Solution
Mastek offered a holistic, AI-powered solution to help the client master the complexities of cloud spend. This was designed to eliminate the struggles of unpredictable cloud costs, hidden fees, and a lack of visibility.
We deployed Lightbeam, a specialized AI-based workload and cost optimization solution for Snowflake. With flexible hosting, streamlined onboarding, and a 360° dashboard, Lightbeam provided powerful usage and cost forecasting along with GenAI-based insights. This would empower the business to reduce their Total Cost of Ownership, accelerate service, and enhance administrative control through a truly data-driven approach.
Warehouse Auto-scaling, Materialized View Recommender, Query Optimizer, are key innovative features of Lightbeam for optimizing the data cloud workload. Mastek also built Lightbeam’s Dashboard, surpassing Snowflake’s native tools, to provide a detailed view of costs, usage, performance, and storage, particularly for complex queries.
- Data-Driven Decision Making: Defined KPIs and architected a solution that optimized billing and query performance.
- AI-Driven Insights: Developed AI-ML models that analyzed query patterns, provided optimized queries, and generated actionable insights and recommendations for cost reduction and performance optimization.
- Secure and Scalable Deployment: Implemented version-controlled deployment with Docker, enhanced security with SSL certificates and key-pair authentication, and successfully rolled out to multiple Snowflake production instances.
- Ongoing Value: Ensured continuous monitoring and stability management, driving sustained business benefits and performance optimization.
The Lightbeam solution transformed the company’s data management with accelerated data retrieval through Query Optimization, smart insights via an intuitive AI/ML-powered interface, and refined system queries via AI-driven Query Analyzer. The holistic solution features a 360° dashboard for enhanced user experience, usage and cost forecasting, and pre-defined scenarios for Spend Analysis, Query Performance, and Performance Tuning, complemented by AI-powered Query Analyzer and Query Optimizer capabilities.
Impact
The implementation fundamentally transformed the client’s financial operations
- Standardized costing methodology.
- Flexible Data Analytics modeling for dynamic insights.
- High scalability for future growth.
- Uniform reporting, providing a single source of truth.
- A powerful solution to monitor and increase business profitability.
As a result, the life sciences leader now offers better healthcare planning at optimized cost. The solution is remarkably 58% cheaper, 53% faster, and 57% better than their previous manual processes, marking a significant leap in efficiency and cost-effectiveness.