There’s a saying about “eating your own dog food” … or as some companies prefer, “drinking your own champagne.” It’s an important measure of a company’s product; after all, if the company doesn’t use what it’s selling, why should you?

Giving an example of dogfooding to the extreme is data-warehouse-as-a cloud service provider (and monster initial public offering record-breaker) Snowflake Inc.

“We want to measure everything that’s important to our business that will drive the right outcomes,” said Sunny Bedi (pictured), chief information officer and chief data officer of Snowflake. “The end result is operationalizing Snowflake internally to drive our business, making the right choices, right decisions for the company.”

Bedi spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during Snowflake’s Data Cloud Summit. They discussed how Snowflake the company uses Snowflake the product. (* Disclosure below.)

Measure everything

Snowflake’s information technology team works closely with its engineering and product management teams, making the company its own “customer zero,” according to Bedi.

“[We] try to use as much functionality inside our own enterprise and give feedback to our engineering and our product management teams so that they can make the ‘customer one’ experience world-class,” he stated.

And it’s not just Snowflake’s IT team providing product feedback. Everything in the company is funneled into the analytical data warehouse that is Snowflake, creating a virtual compute instance that is known internally as “snow house.”

“We want to measure everything in the company that’s important for the company’s performance,” Bedi said. “We leverage our business applications, our data, our security, our automation, and our compliance to integrate with our product to power all these use cases and workloads in our own environment.”

Simplifying security is one of Snowflake’s biggest selling points and one of the biggest internal use cases, according to Bedi.

“We use the entire monitoring and remediation work that goes in the security compliance world, all through Snowflake,” he said.

Real-time data ingestion and analysis means suspicious events can be prevented. Adding another layer, Snowflake and its key suppliers share data to make the security remediation experience “fantastic,” Bedi added.

On the security front, Snowflake has adopted a CIS framework that has 20 controls and another 20 sub-controls, giving the potential for 400 controls each with a separate source of data that is ingested by Snowflake.

Using the example of asset management for endpoints, servers and network gear, all of the data is ingested and measured inside Snowflake, Bedi explained. “I can tell you exactly how many endpoints I have. I can tell you exactly when an employee gets onboarded what laptop we have given them. When the employee leaves the company, I’ll be collecting that laptop back on time. I’ll be revoking all that access,” he said.

The end goal is to remove the disconnect between the IT department and the rest of the company.

“We want to integrate with the business, to drive the best outcomes that are needed for the company,” Bedi stated. “We definitely don’t want silos. We want integration. We want seamless integration to drive and scale the company for the future.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Snowflake’s Data Cloud Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Data Cloud Summit 2020. Neither Snowflake Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE