Since its launch in 2014, Snowflake has been focused on enabling the data cloud—innovating with their speed, approach to cloud scaling, and consumption-based business model. But they have also led the way with their investment in extensibility and support for the programming languages, frameworks, and data science tools and technologies its users prefer. This partnership with complementary technologies helps deliver great benefits to Snowflake customers. As one of those technology partners, we’d like to congratulate Snowflake on its announcement of new their extensibility features: Snowpark developer experience and Java UDFs. These additions will allow developers and data scientists to leverage Snowflake’s powerful platform capabilities and the benefits of Snowflake’s Data Cloud throughout their data science, integration, quality, and BI projects for increased efficiency and insights.  

ALTR is also leading the way in taking advantage of Snowflake’s commitment to extensibility by delivering our cloud-based data governance and security solutions through direct integration with Snowflake. ALTR taps into Snowflake’s existing masking policies, user-defined functions, (UDFs) and external functions in order to securely protect sensitive data. The powerful and flexible masking policies are connected to columns identified as sensitive. Whenever a masked column is queried, from anywhere inside or outside Snowflake, a UDF within Snowflake is called to act as a bridge to the external function which communicates with ALTR. ALTR then provides direction for how the data in that column should be governed based on established rules and policies.  

“ALTR is an innovator in using Snowflake’s extensibility features,” said Tarik Dwiek, Head of Technology Alliances at Snowflake. “By utilizing these features, they’re able to deliver powerful data protection and security natively integrated, allowing our customers to get more value from their Snowflake investment.”  

ALTR’s integration with these extensibility features allows Snowflake customers to add governance and security more quickly—without any software having to be deployed or code written. They can add sensitive data faster, more securely and deliver more flexible data access because natively-embedded security policies will always be invoked. More data with more flexible access allows data insights to come faster for the business. And this kind of native integration enables the cloud-based, highly scalable Snowflake data platform to interact directly with the cloud-based, highly scalable ALTR data governance and security platform, with no outside components to impede or impair the combined power of the two solutions.  

We believe that this is where the cloud data ecosystem is going—native integrations enabled by extensible platform trailblazers like Snowflake. And we’re thrilled to see Snowflake continue leading the way.  

Watch our webinar with Q2 and Snowflake on how to take a security first approach to moving your data to the cloud.

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