About the Client:
Our client is a major, publicly traded Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) with a multi-billion-dollar portfolio of commercial properties spread across North America.
Background:
As part of a broader cloud modernization effort, the client adopted Snowflake as their centralized data warehouse. Snowflake’s scalability and performance suited their growing data needs—spanning financial data, lease agreements, property operations, tenant activity, and market demographics.
Initially, user access was managed through one-off grants by IT or data admins. This worked when the data team was small and users were few. But as data usage grew across departments—finance, legal, asset management, marketing, and analytics, the manual access model began to crack under pressure. Ensuring the right people had the right access became increasingly difficult, slow, and risky.
Challenges:
- Too Much Access, Too Little Control: Users were given wide-ranging access when they only needed narrow views, increasing the risk of sensitive data exposure
- Compliance Headaches: Manual processes made it hard to audit who had access to what. Maintaining SOX and privacy compliance required weeks of effort
- High Operational Overhead: Every new hire or role change triggered a long string of manual permission updates—slowing teams down and straining IT
- Inconsistent User Experience: Some users had full access; others had none. Most had to request access for every new dashboard or report
- Scalability Roadblocks: With data growing rapidly and more departments depending on it, the client needed a way to scale access securely and consistently
