Why Data Sharing?

At a basic level, data sharing is the ability to distribute the same sets of data resources with multiple users or applications while maintaining data fidelity across all entities consuming the data.

Modern data platform technologies are changing the scope of what is possible for data sharing. Organizations can enable the following:

  • Eliminate data silos: Create a single source of truth for all internal data and share it with thousands of internal data consumers across hundreds of business units.
  • Increase business efficiencies: Share live data with internal and external business partners to optimize spend, streamline operations, and provide superior customer service.
  • Data sharing as a product: Provide direct access to datasets as a monetized service so external users can augment their own data for deeper analysis.

But to fully leverage data sharing in the cloud, businesses need to feel confident that they can respond to data privacy and data security mandates with speed and efficiency.

Snowflake and Okera

Snowflake’s Data Marketplace allows organizations to source data faster and more easily, reduce analytics costs, and monetize data. Anyone who depends on data to drive their decision-making – from data scientists to business analysts and all other data stakeholders – will have live and expedited access to ready-to-query data from an ecosystem of business partners and customers, as well as potentially thousands of data and data service providers.

Snowflake has always been strategic to Okera because of their advanced technology and the vision for the Data Cloud. Both drive the need for high speed, high scale access to data, as well as sharing of data and data insights to the business and its partners. Okera provides the necessary universal data authorization to protect data across the enterprise in a centrally managed and well-governed manner. For this reason, Okera and Snowflake are ideal partners.

Governing Data in Snowflake

Recently, Snowflake announced new advanced security features like Column-Level Security, Dynamic Data Masking, and Row Access Policies, which provide a level of governance and security capability to data that resides in the platform. While these governance and security measures are critical from the data being processed within Snowflake, it does not have “reach” outside of that context. A Universal Data Authorization platform such as Okera can extend the scope of security and governance via data access control across all data systems, clouds and networks.

This is critical in many real-world use cases where data resides in a multiple variety of systems throughout the enterprise, from data lakes to data warehouses, in multiple clouds and legacy/on-premise data stores. Snowflake may be your primary data cloud platform, and your primary point of data access and governance control for that data, but Okera allows you to extend that focus and control to all of the other data that resides in other places. As well as the ability to extend protection to new data purchased from the Snowflake Data Marketplace that may exist in your organization in other places, ensuring data governance consistency across the composite datasets.

Object Tagging, Access History and Auditing

As a Snowflake Data Governance Specialist partner, Okera can now read Snowflake’s native object tags to identify PII or other sensitive data, and leverage those tags to build fine-grained access control policies in the Okera visual policy builder. These tags can also be used to drive data sharing workflows.

Snowflake’s expanded Access History provides a native audit and storage system for user queries to help customers know their data end-to-end, from both external sources and as it flows within Snowflake. Okera will use Snowflake’s Access History API to incorporate the audit capability into the Okera platform to provide additional security context for Snowflake data, while also adding the ability to look across data residing in other data platforms.

This ensures that Snowflake can be a central point in your overall data strategy, with Okera applying those same visibility and control to the external data that resides outside of Snowflake. Okera and Snowflake together ensure that there are no gaps in your overall data consumption and protection strategy.

Conclusion

Okera applauds the continuing advancement and enriched capabilities of the Snowflake Data Cloud. As the Snowflake platform becomes more robust, the scale and speed of Okera increases in partnership, ultimately in pursuit of our shared goal of helping enterprise customers know, control, and unlock their data.