Snowflake Computing Inc. has a new service that it says can enable companies to act upon new business information faster.

Unveiled this morning, Snowpipe is accessible from within the startup’s cloud-based data warehouse and provides the ability to automatically ingest updates as they come in.  Normally, analyzing information in real-time requires setting up complicated workflows that can be difficult to operate on a large scale. Snowflake says that its new tool takes the hassle out of the process.

To get started, a company must create a bucket in Amazon Web Services Inc.’s popular S3 object store to serve as a staging ground for incoming data. Since many modern applications already rely on S3 to hold their records and its interface is quite familiar to enterprise developers, this part is fairly straightforward. Snowflake says that the next step is simply to connect link Snowpipe with the target bucket.

According to the startup, the service continuously checks for new items and quickly loads them into its data warehouse when they arrive. Companies can customize how data is handled via a relatively straightforward programming interface.

Behind the scenes, Snowpipe automatically provisions the infrastructure necessary to transfer the information without requiring any manual input. It runs on AWS and relies on the Amazon Kinesis stream processing engine to perform the heavy-lifting. Snowflake says that customers will only be billed for the computational resources used to move their records.

Coupled with the service’s automation features, this pricing model could potentially help lower the entry barrier to real-time data streaming. The ability to ingest fresh records as soon as they becomes available can in turn benefit analytics initiatives by allowing business users to base their decisions on the most-up-to-date information. That’s particularly important in areas such as the financial sector where potentially significant changes can occur from one moment to the next.

Snowpipe is currently available in public beta.