How Massachusetts Education Office Saves $1.5M Annually with Snowflake

The Massachusetts Executive Office of Education oversees the educational infrastructure for millions of Bay State residents, supporting agencies ranging from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) to early childhood programs and community colleges. Massachusetts consistently ranks first nationally in educational achievement, and the EOE’s ability to inform policy with timely, accurate data is central to that performance. The challenge was that its data infrastructure had not kept pace with its analytical ambitions.

Before the Snowflake migration, EOE operated 789 on-premises servers across 36 operating system versions with more than 100 applications. Analysts spent significant time waiting for data extracts and managing complex pipelines rather than answering policy questions. Calculating the student growth percentile — a key metric measuring grade-level mastery — took more than five hours on a local desktop machine. Licensing fees, aging hardware, and an expiring data center lease made the status quo unsustainable. As Danielle Norton, Senior Program Manager at EOE, put it: “In moving from Oracle and SQL Server to Snowflake, we’re making data more available to policymakers while streamlining processes, upgrading our infrastructure and applications, and saving critical money and energy.”

EOE rearchitected its data environment using AWS and Snowflake, migrating workloads iteratively from Oracle and SQL Server using Snowflake’s Snowconvert tool. Analysts adopted Snowflake Notebooks for SQL and Python workflows, data validations, and multi-step reporting automation. The DESE team now prepares reports in hours rather than the two weeks previously required. The student growth percentile calculation moved to RStudio running in Snowpark Container Services, and Microsoft Power BI dashboards connected to Snowflake now surface key student metrics — enrollment, attendance, graduation rates — for real-time access by commissioners and the public.

The results are measurable across both cost and performance. EOE reduced its server footprint by 94%, automated 44,000 application builds and deployments, and migrated 132 applications to the cloud. The migration from Oracle to Snowflake cut total cost of ownership by $1.5 million annually. Data analytics run 30% faster overall while consuming a quarter of the previous processing power. Most dramatically, the student growth percentile calculation — a metric on which policy decisions depend — now runs 93% faster using Snowpark Container Services, completing in minutes rather than five-plus hours.

EOE is now using its modernized data foundation to expand what’s analytically possible. The team is piloting Snowflake Intelligence for reading audit documents from S3 buckets, with early results described as “really promising.” Snowflake’s data sharing capabilities will allow the agency to bypass SFTP processes and expand collaboration with partners inside and outside the state. The platform now underpins a 360-degree view of the student journey across Massachusetts, supporting data-informed decisions on scholarships, career outcomes, and educational investments.