Case Study: Discover Financial Services saves 200,000 hours with Alation
Key results
The challenge
After more than 35 years and multiple acquisitions, Discover had accumulated hundreds of petabytes of data across on-prem systems, its Snowflake Data Cloud, and an AWS S3 data lake. Building data pipelines required a manual process that took up to 30 days, and multiple metadata platforms left analysts and engineers without a single place to find and understand the right data.
The solution
Discover deployed the Alation Data Intelligence Platform to capture and enrich active metadata across Snowflake, Teradata, Oracle, Tableau, and other systems, cataloging about a million tables. The Alation Data Governance App added decentralized governance to protect sensitive data while enabling self-service.
“Alation has become our North Star, a single pane of glass in one system for our metadata.”
PJPrakash JaganathanSenior Director, Enterprise Data Platforms, Discover Financial Services
The results, in context
More than 2,500 users across Discover now use Alation on over a million cataloged tables, achieving 15x faster pipeline creation and cutting data discovery from up to two days to as little as 15 minutes. Discover attributes 200,000 hours saved to the resulting productivity gains.