A leading financial institution with the nation's largest all-digital banking platform, this organization serves over 11 million customers, embodying innovation and customer dedication.

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Leveraging highly sensitive data to enhance customer engagement and optimize user experiences, the company faces challenges with strict financial regulations. To meet immediate regulatory requirements and strengthen its long-term data governance over sensitive data, it has turned to ALTR for for best-in-breed data access governance and data protection.

The Challenge

• Self-Reported Governance Issues
• Regulatory Mandates for Real-time Observability
• Inadequate Existing Systems

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Self-Reported Governance Issues

The financial institution self-reported data governance issues to the regulatory authorities, which set a strict May 2024 deadline for resolution. This demanded a rapid and thorough revamp of the bank's data observability strategy under significant pressure.

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Regulatory Mandates for Real-Time Observability

The bank needed real-time observability of sensitive data within its Snowflake environment to meet regulatory demands for immediate detection and response to unauthorized access or changes. This requirement extended to meticulous oversight of all sensitive activities, including creating, deleting, and modifying database objects, crucial for maintaining data governance integrity and compliance.

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Inadequate Existing Systems

The existing systems were not designed to facilitate real-time data access observability, and Snowflake data logs are often delayed 4+ hours, rendering them useless in meeting the real-time visibility required by regulations. 

The Solution

• Strategic Implementation of Custom Object Tagging
• Cloud Native Solution Purpose-Built for Snowflake

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Strategic Implementation of Custom Object Tagging

The financial institution, in partnership with ALTR, adopted Snowflake Object Tagging in concert with ALTR’s custom audit features to automate all data access governance policies within its Snowflake environment. This initiative removed the significant complexity involved with their previous column-based masking system, offering greater visibility and control over all access to sensitive data subject to regulations.

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ALTR’s custom audit features were central to a comprehensive Snowflake Object tag-based policy, thoughtfully designed to elevate the Snowflake’s usability, scalability, and sustainability. A pivotal component of this policy was the deployment of real-time observability and audit logging mechanisms specifically tailored to monitor all queries over sensitive data. This holistic approach streamlined data governance, created alignment with Information Security requirements, and ensured full compliance with strict regulatory mandates.

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Cloud Native Solution Purpose-Built for Snowflake

ALTR’s cloud native integration with Snowflake enabled critical capabilities within this institution to help overcome the regulatory compliance issue. Real-time observability, access control, and alerts and notifications are all made possible through the architectural advantages of ALTR’s SaaS solution. Further, ALTR introduced custom auditing capabilities designed to capture and scrutinize all sensitive data operations in real-time. This innovation coupled with ALTR’s real-time observability features, created immediate, detailed audit logs for every sensitive data interaction. These query audits, along with any policy alerts and notifications, are then systematically replicated to an Amazon S3 bucket to be seamlessly ingested into Splunk for further analysis and threat detection by this institutions Information Security Team. This framework facilitated real-time data access monitoring capability, enabling the institution to promptly identify and respond to abnormal or potentially unauthorized data activities.

The Results

• Enhanced Data Governance with Scalable Masking Framework
• Elevated Team Collaboration and Integration
• Simplification of Operational Processes
• Achieved Regulatory Compliance
• Raising the Bar for Industry Standards

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Enhanced Data Governance with a Scalable Masking Framework

The institution overcame the complexity of a native, column-based data masking framework by adopting ALTR's cloud-native solution and enabling Snowflake Object Tags, boosting data access policy management efficiency across teams.

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Elevated Team Collaboration and Integration

The adoption of user-friendly, cloud-native solutions has strengthened collaboration between the institution's Enterprise Data Architecture and Information Security teams, fostering a unified approach to real-time data access and security monitoring, which required significantly less data engineering resources.

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Simplification of Operational Processes

ALTR’s point & click UI replaced complex native SQL scripting within Snowflake, simplifying workflows, improving data management, and removing weeks from their data access policy change framework.

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Achieved Regulatory Compliance

ALTR’s cloud-native integration with Snowflake, coupled with its custom audit capabilities fully supported the regulatory compliance requirements for having real-time observability over all sensitive data access in Snowflake.

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Raising the Bar for Industry Standards

The institution's proactive measures and advanced solutions have addressed compliance challenges and set new benchmarks in data management practices within the financial sector, advancing regulatory compliance and data stewardship.