Snowflake CoE to Manage Cost and Elevate Value

Building a Snowflake Center of Excellence to Maximize Value and Scale Adoption

Like many insurers, our client, a multinational property and casualty (P&C) insurance company, relied heavily on data to drive underwriting, claims, and compliance decisions. But as the organization expanded its use of Snowflake’s Data Cloud for its next-generation Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW), new challenges emerged. The consumption-based model provided scalability and flexibility, but without strong governance, costs were rising unpredictably.

Our client faced familiar obstacles:

Limited visibility into project delivery and operational costs, making it difficult to forecast and control spend.
No attribution of compute usage to business units or projects, obscuring accountability.
Performance inefficiencies from warehouses that were not sized or managed appropriately.
Lack of visibility into egress charges related to disaster recovery or external data transfers.
Gaps in governance and best practices, leading to inconsistent adoption across teams.
Limited enablement resources, leaving users without clear guidance on how to maximize the platform’s potential.

Establishing a Snowflake Center of Excellence

To overcome these challenges, the insurer partnered with PremiumIQ, a data and analytics consulting firm with deep Snowflake expertise and a focus specifically on P&C insurance companies. Working together, they established a Snowflake Center of Excellence (COE).

The COE was designed not to limit Snowflake usage, but to maximize the value of every dollar invested in the platform.

Key elements included:

Cost Optimization Governance (COG): Providing real-time insights into project costs, enabling leaders to track cost-to-achieve and ongoing operational costs with precision.
CTA Review Process: Defining checkpoints at key project milestones to review and adjust cost-to-achieve estimates, ensuring accuracy and accountability throughout the project lifecycle.
Performance Management: Implementing processes to right-size warehouses, shifting about 75% of workloads to more efficient compute tiers while still scaling to handle over 130TB of daily data writes.
Governance and Compliance: Introducing role-based access controls (RBAC) to strengthen data security and align with regulatory requirements.
Community Engagement: Hosting office hours, targeted trainings, and project-level partnerships to drive best practice adoption across the enterprise.
Continuous Improvement: Embedding reporting and analytics that enabled detailed compute monitoring, ongoing optimization, and accountability at the project level.

Results and Impact

The Snowflake COE, delivered with PremiumIQ’s guidance, quickly produced measurable results:

33% increase in adoption, onboarding 1,200 Snowflake users and expanding the platform’s reach across business units.
Over $300K in annual savings by streamlining processes, improving data asset management, and optimizing performance.
Greater cost transparency, with project-level reporting that made usage and ROI clear to stakeholders.
Improved compliance and data security, thanks to role-based access controls.

Enabling the Future

“Establishing a COE gave our client more than cost savings. It provided the visibility and discipline they needed to treat Snowflake as a growth engine, not just infrastructure. With governance, performance management, and enablement in place, they can scale with confidence and reinvest in the analytics and innovation that drive growth in the P&C market.”

— Avinash Sawant, Managing Director, PremiumIQ

For our client, the Snowflake COE transformed the way the organization thinks about data and technology investments. The narrative shifted from “spending less” to “investing smarter.” Instead of viewing cost optimization as a constraint, the COE freed up capacity and budget to reinvest in high-value initiatives like AI-driven risk modeling, advanced analytics, and customer-facing digital innovation.

With PremiumIQ’s insurance expertise and deep Snowflake knowledge, our client embedded governance, performance, and enablement at scale, ensuring that Snowflake is not just a technology platform but a strategic enabler of business growth and competitive advantage.