Congratulations on kicking off your Snowflake journey! Or at least thinking about starting your journey with Snowflake. This puts you among the thousands of companies working with Snowflake to extract the maximum value from their data. And, based on what we’ve seen so far, I feel pretty confident that your Snowflake project will be successful. Before you know it, you’ll be inundated with requests – your colleagues will want more and more and more – and they’ll all want the answer yesterday. You’ll go from two users to 10 to 1,000 with no time to catch a breath.  

To ensure you’re keeping up with the speed of your business and not lagging behind from day one, it’s critical to have the right tools for your journey from the very start. That means including a data governance and security solution. This may not be on your list of priorities today – maybe you’re focused on other tasks, don’t think you need it, or believe it’s too time-consuming, complicated or costly.

But you won’t be able to get the most value from your Snowflake project as quickly if you don’t have an effective data governance and security solution from the beginning. I’ll explain why.    

You will need to include sensitive data and you will need to protect it

One of the primary reasons you’re making the move to Snowflake is to extract the maximum insights from your data to make better business decisions. You might start with anonymized datasets, but you’ll quickly need to include sensitive data to get the most insights, so why wait? The sooner you can run analytics on data that really matters, the faster you can deliver that value to the business. If you plan to do that from the beginning, that means preparing to comply with regulations around data privacy and protection. With new laws popping up across the US monthly, there’s no industry exempt from making sure data is safe from leaks and misuse. And there’s no lag to the risk – the day after you add the data, a trusted user could be phished or data could be misused, violating regulations.  

Snowflake data governance and security features can be hard to manage at scale and don’t include all the protections you need

Snowflake delivers the enterprise class security we all expect from leading cloud providers as well as some crucial features for protecting sensitive data, with more added in each new release. However, executing and managing those features must be done manually via SQL code – limiting the number of people who can implement and update policies, restricting your ability to scale easily as your project ramps up with new users and more data.  

And, even Snowflake will tell you that it can’t be responsible for who has access, what data you include, or controlling how those two intersect: who should have access to what data. This means there’s no mechanism to stop credentialed access threats or privileged access to sensitive data – if someone has the right log in information, they can take as much data as they like. It’s on you to have a solution in place to stop this.  

“Snowflake has a phenomenal security team, world class security posture, but there’s still responsibility on the customer to keep the account secure. And if a user is compromised…there have to be controls in place on the customer’s side to detect that’s happened and to be able to remediate that quickly before the sensitive data gets out,” Omer Singer, Head of Cyber Security Strategy at Snowflake.  

Data governance and security don’t have to be complicated or costly or slow you down

Consider ALTR a light addition to your pack that helps you move more quickly down the road:  

• Our SaaS solution integrates natively with Snowflake,
• It creates only minimal latency and no scalability issues in your data access,
• It’s easily implemented and managed via a no-code user interface requiring no database engineers or additional FTEs,  
• Delivers advanced data governance and security features that Snowflake doesn’t, including consumption observability and limits; predictive consumption thresholds; alerts via text, messaging, email, phone, SIEM or SOC integrations; and tokenization of sensitive data,  
• And with our free-for-life plan available on ALTR.com or through Snowflake Partner Connect, you can get started at zero cost today. Download our Quick Start guide to see how easy it is to get going.  

Accelerate your Snowflake journey with a boost from ALTR

The best thing you can do for your business is accelerate your adoption of your cloud data platform so you can drive business value faster. Imagine six months down the road, you’re two years ahead of where you hoped to be. Planning your trip right from the start can enable you to do that. You eliminate the need to come to a screeching halt a few months in to think about how to manage data governance and security.

You can keep moving ahead of the speed of your business, leading the way to maximum data value, when you include ALTR from the start.