More and more businesses are using the cloud platform Snowflake because it’s fast and easy to use, but they still need to consider data privacy. This blog series lays out best practices for managing information access and security in the platform.
Storing your analytical data in Snowflake opens a new world of possibilities for information access and security.
Snowflake is a database platform like SQL Server or Oracle but purpose-built from scratch for the cloud. Its developers kept familiar concepts (tables, views, SQL queries) but threw out all assumptions about how databases traditionally work and embraced everything cloud computing offers. You can read more about the basics of the platform here.
Snowflake’s underlying architecture makes it easy to provide high-performance data access to any number of internal and external users with far more efficiency than traditional databases. Organizations can extract enormous value from the data they collect in Snowflake if they can keep it organized and accessible while not allowing sensitive information to escape.
This six-part series will propose a set of technology, architecture, and process standards to support these goals while balancing cost, maintainability, and performance.
Read the Series
Snowflake Security and Data Privacy: Identifying, Organizing and Isolating Data
We start the series by walking through how to identify the data at hand across several dimensions and fine-tune access to ensure each consumer only sees exactly what you want them to see, right down to the row and column level.
Snowflake Security and Data Privacy: Granular Access Control with Snowflake’s Advanced Features
Next, we take identifying, organizing, and isolating data a step further using some of Snowflake’s advanced features. Part two covers the concept of data granularity: how to apply rules that control specific rows and columns from a single table that a given user can see.
Snowflake Security and Data Privacy: Using Snowflake Tags to Boost Privacy and Security
Snowflake tags are another tool you can use to support your data security efforts. In part three of this blog series, we explain what object tagging is and how you can use it for data governance.
Snowflake Security and Data Privacy: Establishing Row Access Policies
As we continue our blog series with part four, we break down how you can use Snowflake row access policies to keep sensitive data protected.
Snowflake Security and Data Privacy: Snowflake Roles – Pulling it All Together
In part five of this blog series, we explain how Snowflake roles keep data access and privacy policies organized and universal by establishing who has access to what on both a data and compute level in a centralized location
Snowflake Security and Data Privacy: Snowflake Security vs. Privacy — Regulating Internal Data Access
In our final entry, we’ll discuss a balanced approach to internal controls and some guiding principles that will help you make decisions along the way using the tools from the rest of the series.
Data governance is essential to creating trustworthy, sustainable and repeatable value through data. What does that mean for you?
