With more and more businesses opting to derive valuable insights from their data on the Snowflake Data Cloud, safely managing sensitive data has emerged as a top priority for data driven organizations. ALTR has worked closely with Snowflake since our partnership began in 2020, building and continuing to foster our SaaS-based, cloud-native integration. ALTR's SaaS solution has been recognized as a Snowflake Premier Technology Partner with a Snowflake Financial Services Competency badge. ALTR’s primary focus is on delivering best-in-class data access governance and integrated data security over data in Snowflake, designed to make customers more successful on Snowflake, more quickly.
ALTR takes Snowflake’s powerful native data governance capabilities and automates them at scale to deliver real-time data access monitoring and analytics, point-and-click policy-based access controls, and advanced data protection. These features are all delivered as pure SaaS with no code required to implement, scale, and maintain. By automating Snowflake’s native capabilities with ALTR, customers maximize the value of their Snowflake investment, enhance their data governance maturity, and solidify their data security posture.
ALTR + the Snowflake Horizon Partner Ecosystem
ALTR is proud to be a part of the Snowflake Horizon Partner Ecosystem, Snowflake’s built-in governance solution with a unified set of compliance, security, privacy, interoperability, and access capabilities. ALTR’s partnership with Snowflake will help further extend the Snowflake Data Cloud across customers’ data stacks. ALTR continuously integrates the latest features and capabilities offered by Snowflake into our SaaS solution, enabling joint customers to take advantage of Snowflake's native capabilities easily and efficiently, with immediate time to value.
How ALTR Helps Customers Safeguard Data within Snowflake Horizon
Data Classification
With ALTR and Snowflake, data users can automatically classify their data and receive classification results in minutes. Snowflake clients can select from multiple methods for data classification: Snowflake Native, any third-party classification engine, or a productized GDLP plug-in integrated in ALTR. Together, customers can automate the discovery and classification process without writing any code, allowing businesses to derive business critical insights from their data in a matter of minutes. Using ALTR’s Shift Left data governance capabilities, data classification can be moved upstream in to ETL/ELT pipelines to classify and tag data before it lands in Snowflake.
Real-time Observability over Sensitive Data Access
With ALTR, customers can achieve real-time observability over how users access sensitive data in Snowflake, regardless of access point. ALTR logs all data access into an easy-to-consume query log, which can be published in real-time to a client owned S3 bucket, enabling any SIEM tool to ingest real-time data access telemetry for analysis and visualization. These access logs are visualized directly in ALTR’s product in heatmap format. This feature helps data users analyze and report on data access, ensure that governance policies are being correctly enforced, and pinpoint areas where new policies can be implemented. ALTR records the metadata over each query for governed data, along with user, time, and the number of values returned, providing visibility to understand normal patterns, and easily spot abnormalities that could indicate risk. With every query recorded, compliance audits become simplified and streamlined, giving customers complete and real-time transparency to all attempted access requests of their sensitive data.
Dynamic Data Masking & Automated Access Controls
ALTR greatly simplifies the implementation and maintenance of complex and granular data masking policies to safeguard confidential information in Snowflake. Using ALTR’s point and click UI, customers can effortlessly view the data and roles to which their policies apply, easily create new policies and modify existing ones, all without requiring any SQL coding. Further, all policy orchestration and management can be fully automated, at scale, using ALTR’s Management API. Data Masking with ALTR and Snowflake helps organizations meet regulatory requirements, such as GDPR, HIPPA, and PCI DSS by protecting sensitive data and ensuring privacy. Snowflake clients rapidly realize the enormous value of ALTR’s policy automation capabilities through eliminating the reliance on data engineering resources to manage access control changes. ALTR democratizes access policy management to non-technical users, frees up Data Engineering to focus on higher value tasks, and enables access control changes in minutes versus days or weeks.
Advanced Data Protection – Purpose Built for Snowflake
With ALTR, customers gain access to a wide range of techniques for obfuscating and anonymizing data, such as Format Preserving Encryption and External Tokenization, giving data users the freedom to choose an advanced data protection model that best fits their business needs.
ALTR combines advanced data protection with policy to ensure no sensitive data can be accessed outside of approved policy. ALTR sits in the critical path of data and creates a compliance-ready, audit rich query log of all requests for data subject to ALTR’s advanced data protection. Any data that is subject to compliance regulations like HIPAA, GDPR, PCI, or any forthcoming privacy rules, is protected within ALTR’s SaaS based product. Further, ALTR’s query audits perfect the chain of custody over sensitive data and reflect any time protected values are de-tokenized or decrypted.
ALTR Delivers Real-Time Alerting & Notifications
ALTR’s unique, pure SaaS solution offers a distinctive set of features that ensure the security of data in Snowflake, such as data tokenization, format preserving encryption, user access controls, and real-time alerting. Only ALTR can ensure that your sensitive data is accessible only to the appropriate people, at the appropriate time, and in the appropriate amounts. ALTR’s patent-issued Data Rate Limiting means that out of policy requests for data can be blocked in real-time and single users can be quarantined without impacting other users with the same role. Data Owners and InfoSec Teams can trust that notifications will be delivered immediately through their preferred communication channel, like Slack, Teams, or email, anytime anyone attempts to access sensitive data without authorization. Only ALTR offers active security for your most sensitive data assets in Snowflake that can stop credentialed access threats before they can happen.
Get Started for Free Today
With ALTR’s native integrations in Snowflake Data Cloud, we’re proud to be a part of the Snowflake Horizon Partner Ecosystem and are thrilled to continue our extensive partnership with Snowflake. ALTR's free integration in Snowflake Partner Connect allows data users to drastically reduce manual tasks to deliver more data value, more quickly.