CityFibre is one of the U.K’.s biggest fibre networks, connecting millions to high-speed broadband. Piyush Shandilya, Data Architect at CityFibre explains how the company uses Snowflake to process and analyze large, integrated data sets at speed, powering future growth and delivering next-gen connectivity.  

CityFibre is the U.K.’s third largest gigabit network and is predicted to connect 8 million people by 2025. Unlike its competitors, it’s the only pure fibre network in the country, meaning it doesn’t manage any of the legacy infrastructure associated with slow connection speeds, unplanned downtime and costly maintenance. 

As such, CityFibre has grown rapidly over the past few years, operating like a tech startup that’s unburdened by monolithic systems and complicated architectures. 

But when it comes to data, the company found that rapid growth can quickly outstrip data infrastructure capabilities. Piyush Shandilya, Data Architect at CityFibre, explains: “From network planning and tracking to end-to-end order management, data is imperative to our organization and allows us to adapt to changing market conditions rapidly. But our pace of growth created lots of manual data sets over time, which we found difficult to combine for richer insights.”

What’s more, CityFibre had a “right first time” mission. This means the company wanted to set the expectation that whether minimizing downtime or hitting customer expectations, it would strive to resolve issues at the first point of contact. CityFibre is also a contract partner for the U.K. government’s flagship Project Gigabit—a high-speed broadband connectivity initiative—which demands significant compliance obligations, requiring accurate and timely reporting capabilities. 

But achieving all this meant creating a data ecosystem that could bridge the gaps between different lines of business, and provide a single source of truth to support faster and more accurate decision-making. 

A single source of information that ticks all the boxes 

Realizing the constraints CityFibre faced with its existing data environment, Shandilya set about evaluating several data warehouses based on mission-critical criteria. “Any new data environment had to be instantly scalable with zero maintenance, have separate compute and storage, conform to strict security requirements, and balance high performance with the simplicity of a single cloud,” said Shandilya. “Snowflake’s Data Cloud hit all our demands, including the ability to integrate with other key systems—such as Salesforce and ServiceNow—straight away. We were also confident it would help us achieve our goal of creating an event-based architecture.” 

Working with Snowflake implementation partner Prodapt, CityFibre accelerated its infrastructure migration while benefiting from industry best practices. 

Data processing and analysis at scale 

For a growing company like CityFibre, a scalable data environment is critical to achieving the right insights and agility to preempt market demand and take action. The organization has now reached a point where large volumes of data can be ingested in real time—including from several third-party sources that make up CityFibre’s wider data ecosystem. 

CityFibre now ingests 2 TB of data each day, and Shandilya predicts this will scale to 1 TB per hour in the near future. “We could only ingest one data source on our old infrastructure, which was very time consuming and created a huge bottleneck,” said Shandilya. “Now, we ingest, process and analyze 29 sources at once. And while transforming data used to be a very manual process for us, we’ve simplified our extract, transform and load (ETL) process to be much more efficient.” 

CityFibre has also automated its reporting processes. So, while many of its competitors still rely on manual reporting methods, CityFibre has completed its Phase-1 Project Gigabit compliance reporting in just three months—giving the company’s management team complete peace of mind that their data and reports are fully compliant. 

Seamless data sharing that keeps everyone on the same page

CityFibre has also transformed its approach to data sharing. By creating a rules-based infrastructure, the company has gone from just one line of business having access to its data infrastructure to eight in just 18 months. 

This consistency between teams means that everyone now works from the same source of truth, making data more accurate, and above all, secure. CityFibre can now also ingest and share highly sensitive data that’s critical to the company’s operations and planning. “Before Snowflake, we couldn’t encrypt and ingest personally identifiable information (PII) or perform data subject requests (DSR),” explained Shandilya. “Snowflake’s end-to-end encryption means we can apply governance in a way that’s appropriate for a critical infrastructure organization.” 

From high processing speeds and automated scaling to transparent costs born out of separate storage and compute, CityFibre can now better serve its business needs, and drive network growth and customer satisfaction. “CityFibre needed a scalable tool that could handle lots of data,” said Shandilya. “And in our industry, we would have been in trouble if we hadn’t found one. Snowflake’s Data Cloud is instant. It gives us the confidence to know we can ingest any data type at any time, and it’s helped us reduce costs in the process.” 

CityFibre also benefits from system integrations with other critical third-party data platforms that help give the company a competitive edge when it comes to data-driven insights. For example, the company uses Snowpark in Snowflake’s Data Cloud together with AWS SageMaker to eliminate programming language barriers that can hamper production for machine learning products and workflows. 

Harnessing data as a strategic asset 

Looking to the future, CityFibre is focused on growth, with further data integration and innovation at the heart of its strategy. “Our next goal is to integrate all our network data in Snowflake—that’s data covering 8 million homes,” said Shandilya. “This will help us fulfill our service level agreement obligations to our customers, enabling us to produce reports in just minutes rather than several hours.” 

Shandilya and his team are also exploring how CityFibre can use its geographic information system (GIS) data to act as a master network blueprint to optimize future cable routes, and even predict external factors that could affect its current and future network layout. 

The company will also take advantage of unstructured data processing in Snowflake’s Data Cloud, allowing it to gain deeper revenue leakage insights and produce quicker compliance reports for central government on a far greater scale than before—a key requirement of its work building the next-generation critical national infrastructure. 

The post CityFibre Integrates and Scales Its Data Estate to Boost Operational Efficiency and Optimize Its Future Network With Snowflake  appeared first on Snowflake.