Snowflake's Cloud Data Warehouse (CDW) provides secure and easy access to any data with near-infinite scalability. By enabling seamless consumption and collaboration of shared data across the enterprise, Snowflake customers can make better business decisions while save valuable time and money. However, the convenience of having all of your data accessible from one platform also generates a whole new set of risks and exposures. It's critical to have full transparency and control anytime your sensitive data is being accessed.
The Need for Data Governance in Cloud Data Warehouses
Even the best CDWs need some help when it comes to managing data access, and data governance more broadly. Companies like Snowflake offer straightforward safeguards when it comes to basic user permissions and protection for at-rest data so that you can rightly feel comfortable about shipping your data to them.
Ultimately, though, the great value delivered by Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, and other CDWs is high performance at a very attractive price. They’re not in the business of supplying locks on the consumption of data, and because their whole infrastructure is virtualized, it’s not workable to implement traditional measures such as data loss prevention (DLP) or endpoint protection around the data stack.
Regulating initial access to a CDW is easy enough thanks to single sign-on (SSO) providers like Okta. Using one of these tools makes it easy for the organization to authenticate remote users before letting them inside the front gate of the CDW.
After that, however, things get slippery from the standpoint of data governance. Who is accessing which data? How much data at a time? When? From where? These are the open questions that every company using CDWs must address.The Need for Data Governance in Cloud Data Warehouses
The Need for Observability in Cloud Data Warehouses
Cloud data platforms provides advanced analytics and data visualizations. Having all of your data in one platform allows you to supply better insights faster. But what about the insights around how data is being accessed within the cloud data warehouse itself?
CDWs provide a lot of good information about data access natively, but to optimize your cloud data warehouse you must see how it’s being used at a granular level, and apply classification groupings to understand interaction with different data types. Not only can you gain additional insights, but you can then understand the consumption of data with the goal of putting the best policy and rules in place to follow privacy and compliance regulations without disrupting users.
Once you have that in place you can begin to publish that data back into your cloud data warehouse for analysis.
How ALTR Fills these Gaps
ALTR's approach pairs the benefits of your CDW with a solution for data governance and observability that work in parallel — one that’s abstracted, elastic, and has no infrastructure. By using a last-mile, client-side approach, ALTR provides data governance without any impact on performance. By distributing security across all of the code, ALTR gives you the most control, the most visibility, and the most context while also allowing you to harness the full flexibility, speed, and scalability of your CDW.
ALTR will help you optimize your Cloud Data Warehouse by:
- Governing each user down to the individual query
- Tracking and logging all activity, including administrative actions
- Implementing rules and thresholds to govern the flow of data
Whether you are a current Snowflake customers or just evaluating the platform, it's important to understand where you could be at risk of exposure. Don’t risk going without full transparency and governance when it comes to your most valuable asset, the data.
Learn more about how ALTR can optimize your Cloud Data Warehouse