In preparation for a recent webinar, I chatted with both the other presenters to get deeper insight into the webinar topic “A Security-First Approach to Re-Platforming Data in the Cloud” and to give you an idea of what you can expect to learn from our On-Demand webinar.

This post features Omer Singer, the Head of Cyber Security Strategy from Snowflake, another industry expert with years of experience in both cybersecurity and cloud data warehouses.  

As I’m sure you already know, Snowflake enables organizations to easily and securely access, integrate, and analyze data with near-infinite scalability. The rapid adoption of solutions like Snowflake is the main reason we are discussing what it looks like to re-platform data in the cloud. Who better to give us valuable insight and lessons learned than one of their own?  

Here's some of what Omer had to say:

1. What's a common mistake you see companies make when re-platforming data in the cloud/Snowflake?

Companies are used to thinking about network security architectures, and they've been adapting that approach to cloud security. When it comes to data security, there is still a tendency to start with a flat architecture that relies too heavily on authentication as the exclusive security control. In fact, Snowflake has granular RBAC capabilities that are very capable of restricting data access to the right people. While Snowflake has automated nearly all the onerous management tasks, access control is one of those things that each org needs to tailor for itself. Because it's on the customer to manage who has access to what datasets, it's also on the customer to monitor for account compromise and abuse, no different from monitoring infrastructure cloud activity. That's something that security teams are becoming more aware of recently and I'm glad that they have solutions like ALTR that can help them be successful.  

2. What are the benefits of a Security Data Lake? Why is it important?

Anyone that's paying attention to the headlines can tell that cybersecurity has yet to achieve its objective of companies operating online with assurance. Instead, there are justified concerns around the risk companies take on by adopting new technologies and becoming more interconnected. The answer is not to avoid progress but to see these powerful new technologies as opportunities for achieving radically better cybersecurity. The cloud, with its bottomless storage and nearly unlimited compute resources, can become an enabler for big progress in areas like threat detection and identity management. A security data lake is really just a concept that says "Infosec is joining the rest of the company on a cloud data platform". At Snowflake, we're starting to see the impact of this movement at our customers and it's very exciting.

3. What do you hope the audience takes away from this webinar?

It's not like security teams have an overabundance of time on their hands but I'm hoping that they use this webinar as an opportunity to revisit their data security strategy. Just like everyone in the audience has learned in the past that using the public cloud doesn't mean not worrying about cloud security, I hope there's a similar aha! moment around the increasingly critical cloud data platform. I also hope that the examples we'll be sharing about combining ALTR insights with other datasets to catch compromised accounts and insider threats will get attendees fired up about doing security analytics themselves.  

End of Q&A.

Between Omer (Snowflake) and Lou (Q2), our webinar was illuminating and thought-provoking for everyone involved. Click the image below to watch the webinar on demand.