Financial Services was one of the first industries to recognize data's significant potential to understand customers better, improve services and streamline operations. However, the financial services industry faces unique data challenges despite data’s apparent benefits. Financial information is highly sensitive; as such, data governance in financial services is driven by strict regulations to protect it. This has led to conflicting forces: the urge to hold sensitive data in highly secure, on-premises databases owned and managed by the organization’s IT and security teams versus the drive to move critical data to a centralized cloud.
Until now, misconceptions around compromised data protection and privacy and the ability to achieve regulatory compliance have deterred many financial institutions from cloud adoption. However, with the cloud’s undeniable cost, scalability and flexibility benefits, the question for financial institutions is not whether to migrate to the cloud or not but how to transition to the cloud securely.
Virtual Fireside Chat: Secure Cloud Migration for Financial Institutions - Best practices for navigating cloud migration challenges Financial Institutions face with TDECU, Matillion, Wavicle and Snowflake
ALTR and Snowflake make data governance in financial services quick and easy. We help Financial Institutions comply with the strictest financial regulations while also making data available across the business. We also enable firms of all sizes to follow the Cloud Data Management Capabilities (CDMC) framework for protecting sensitive data in a cloud/hybrid cloud environment. ALTR, which seamlessly integrates with Snowflake, automates the configuration and enforcement of access, data masking, usage limits, and tokenization policy so financial institutions can spend less time worrying about data and more time using data.
1. Personalize Customer Experiences with a 360 View
Serving financial customers is about customizing their experience, leveraging a complete view of the customer on a single platform to power analysts, data scientists and applications. Inevitably PII and PFI will be used to provide services and products that lead to customer growth. ALTR helps you automate and scale access to and protection of your customers’ data without having to write, test, and maintain intricate policies.
- By extending ALTR’s security and governance layer to the newly migrated Snowflake Data Cloud, financial institutions can feel comfortable with analysts and data scientists accessing data in Snowflake.
- Without ALTR, financial institutions would have to manually replicate the highest levels of protection using Snowflake’s code-based governance and security features. ALTR automates these tasks away and streamlines data protection wherever it needs to go within the organization.
Case Study: Security Becomes a Business Enabler at this Leading Mortgage Firm - An enterprise-wide data governance and security solution from ALTR lets data users focus on delivering value
2. Automate Enterprise-wide Data Governance
Moving to the Data Cloud can help financial institutions meet regulatory requirements while sharing live access to data through a single platform. Snowflake Data Cloud is with ALTR as a PCI DSS Level 1 Service provider that is Soc 2 Type 2 certified and highly available across multiple regions; you can automate away policy enforcement headaches and make enterprise-wide data governance in financial services once a just a goal, a reality.
- Multiple integration methods allow ALTR to protect customer data from creation to on-premises and cloud data warehouses to multiple banking applications – from start to finish; ALTR covers the data.
- A single pane of glass across all the touch points that store or process sensitive data means there is always a single view of truth about data access and security.
- SaaS-based delivery means data can flow in and out of the company walls, from the data center to Snowflake, without any hiccup in service or protection.
Case Study: TDECU Takes a Data-Driven Approach to Supporting Its Members’ Financial Journeys - Seeking to increase data reliability and accelerate data-driven decision-making, TDECU began its cloud migration with Snowflake. It turned to ALTR to protect member data and ensure regulatory compliance.
3. Monitor Security Controls in Real-Time
Financial institutions can monitor compliance against enterprise security controls like NIST, ISO, CIS or others, using Snowflake with ALTR. Security teams can send ALTR’s rich data usage and event information back into Snowflake to provide the backbone for security analytics and auditing.
“Through their native cloud integration with Snowflake’s platform, ALTR’s approach to providing visibility into data activity in Snowflake’s Data Cloud provides a solution for customers who need to defend against security threats,” said Omer Singer Head of Cybersecurity Strategy, Snowflake.
- A leading mortgage firm loads all alerts and signals to Snowflake Security Data Lake – regardless of source – enabling the security team to bring all enterprise data stores under surveillance.
- According to the firm’s CISO, “With ALTR’s integrations and scalability, I'm not just solving this problem on Snowflake. We're starting with and building on Snowflake, but we’re embracing a solution that can solve this problem across the enterprise for us.”
Blog: Moving to the Cloud Doesn't Have to Be Daunting for Small and Mid-size Financial Institutions - Financial Institutions can easily and safely move your enterprise data warehouse to Snowflake + ALTR
Wrapping Up
For any industry, migrating to the cloud can seem daunting. This is especially true in financial services, where extensive regulations have created the illusion that cloud deployments are challenging and risky. ALTR helps remove this risk with automated enterprise-wide data governance that allows financial institutions of all sizes to control and protect regulated financial data in the cloud as securely as in the data center.