Persistent and Snowflake delivered a secure, scalable data foundation for a global biopharma leader—replicating 208 Salesforce objects in just three months and enabling near real-time, audit-ready insights with privacy-preserving governance.
The result: faster decisions, stronger compliance, and a reusable architecture that grows with the business.
The Customer
A global biopharma leader faced one of healthcare’s most demanding data environments. While Salesforce-based Partner Relationship Management (PRM) processes supported daily operations effectively, the system lacked the ability to retain rich historical context and adapt to frequent schema changes without disruption.
As Persistent worked with analytics, compliance, and operational teams, we identified critical gaps in longitudinal insight and auditability. These gaps slowed decision-making and reduced confidence in downstream reporting. To address these issues, Persistent designed a scalable, compliant data architecture that could evolve with the business and deliver trustworthy insights at speed.
The Challenge
The pharma organization needed a way to unlock historical insights without slowing innovation. Their Salesforce-based operational system did not retain change history, making time-series analysis and audit trails nearly impossible. More than 50 PRM objects evolved with every release, causing downstream data models to struggle with schema drift and versioning inconsistencies.
At the same time, strict governance requirements demanded end-to-end protection of sensitive data, role-based access controls, and privacy compliance. Decision-makers needed fresher, reliable data so reports reflected the current state of the business—not outdated snapshots.
Persistent partnered with the customer to tackle these challenges head-on: build a scalable, compliant data architecture that preserves history, adapts to change, and delivers trusted insights at speed.
The Turning Point
Working together, the biopharma organization, Persistent, and Snowflake aligned on a shared goal: establish a secure, scalable replication backbone on Snowflake that preserves historical data, adapts seamlessly to schema changes, and consistently delivers governed, consumption-ready data to business users.
The team prioritized critical objects and use cases, then codified a modular replication pattern that could be applied quickly across the broader data estate. This reduced implementation risk and significantly accelerated time-to-value.
What We Built (Snowflake + Persistent Approach)
Persistent designed and implemented a centralized Snowflake data layer that captures and preserves every meaningful change across the organization’s data estate. Using a Type 2 Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD) strategy, the platform records historical changes to support audit, compliance, and longitudinal analytics—eliminating the need to search across fragmented systems.
Schema evolution was embedded directly into the workflow, enabling automatic detection and incorporation of new fields and tables introduced in Salesforce. This eliminated brittle rework and ensured analytics remained aligned with ongoing releases.
We built security and governance into the foundation of the solution. Sensitive attributes are encrypted, role-based access controls enforce least privilege, and de-identified datasets enable broad analytical use without exposing PHI or PII. To maintain trust in the data, we actively managed quality through reconciliation and monitoring to surface mismatches and gaps early in the pipeline.
A curated consumption layer presents well-modelled, business-ready views, helping analysts and stakeholders adopt insights immediately while bypassing raw-schema complexity and accelerating time-to-insight.
Why Snowflake (With Persistent)
Snowflake provided the ideal foundation for a scalable, secure data backbone. Its elasticity and simplicity allowed Persistent to scale storage and compute independently, adapting to fluctuating ingestion and analytics demands.
Snowflake’s fine-grained governance and secure data sharing capabilities aligned with the biopharma organization’s compliance requirements, while its performance supported workloads ranging from ingestion to advanced analytics.
Persistent contributed deep healthcare data expertise and a suite of reusable accelerators. Our team translated Snowflake’s strengths into a robust, repeatable implementation tailored to the client’s needs. The outcome was more than just a working pipeline—it became a scalable operating model ready for future data sources and use cases.
The Impact
Persistent delivered a scalable, compliant data backbone that transformed how the global biopharma manages and consumes data. In three months, we replicated 208 Salesforce objects into Snowflake and enabled near real-time refreshes, reducing latency from days to minutes. This empowered clinical, commercial, and compliance teams to make faster, data-driven decisions with confidence.
By preserving historical records and automating schema evolution, we eliminated manual rework and ensured analytics stayed aligned with system changes. Embedded governance controls—encryption, role-based access, and de-identification—enabled secure, compliant access to sensitive data. Reconciliation and monitoring strengthened data trust, while curated consumption layers accelerated insight generation across business functions.
Most importantly, the organization now operates on a reusable architecture that supports rapid onboarding of new data sources, ensuring long-term scalability and continued innovation.
What’s Next
With a resilient replication backbone in place, the biopharma leader is positioned to scale its data strategy. The team will onboard additional operational systems using the same modular framework, ensuring consistency and speed.
Persistent will integrate third-party data sources to enrich analytics securely and support machine learning initiatives with trusted, longitudinal datasets. As the organization grows, Persistent will help ensure that governance, historical integrity, and data freshness continue to scale alongside innovation.
