Governing Your Data

I recently returned from Snowflake’s (@snowflake) semi-annual “Black Diamond Executive Council” in Arizona, a roundtable discussion between our C-level executives and about a dozen of our key customers worldwide. With a mix of enormous data estates, advanced data analysis, and high-velocity data streams—all based on the Snowflake Cloud Data Platform—these customers graciously spent two days providing detailed feedback on our product programs, strategies, and directions.

While you might expect that topics such as workload capacity, “speeds and feeds,” and advanced analytics dominated the discussion, it will probably surprise you to learn that data governance stole the show. And not for the first time: this is now the second Black Diamond Executive Council in a row where data governance stood out head and shoulders above any other topic. At first blush, data governance may seem tangential to Snowflake’s business, but this group doesn’t see it that way at all. In fact, Snowflake is at the core of their data governance strategies, in addition to being the foundation of their analytics efforts.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be that surprising. Last June, scarcely a few weeks after I joined the company, I delivered the keynote presentation at Snowflake Summit, our inaugural users conference, to the more than 2,000 customers who attended the event in San Francisco (and we expect to triple that number this year!). As I walked off the stage, a customer approached me and blurted out, “You didn’t talk about data governance!” He was right; I mentioned many key product features and corporate milestones in my speech, but I didn’t mention data governance.

This is all to say that we’re receiving unmistakable signals from all across our user base: Data governance is a key driver for customers choosing Snowflake. Beyond cloud scale and performance, our major enterprise customers are signaling that one of the most critical values delivered by the Snowflake Cloud Data Platform is the measure of data governance the platform affords them. Basically, they’re saying, “When my data is in Snowflake, I know it’s governed. And therefore, I can rest easy.”

And they’re right. When you ingest data into a cloud data platform through defined processes and it’s controlled, managed, and monitored by a single security model, you make great strides toward data governance, especially compared with traditional data lakes. Data lake initiatives often boil down to improving storage economics through data consolidation, but the benefits get thin after that. And as we’ve pointed out before, the security provisions in a data lake are in many areas an exercise left to the user, having led to several high-profile breaches.

What’s more, many of our customers (maybe you?) have spent years implementing and deploying massive Hadoop and Spark clusters and wrestling with the resulting data governance issues. They can’t authoritatively account for their data, it’s accuracy, where it’s coming from, who has access to it, or where the resulting outputs end up. With this history, the collective anxiety about data governance in general—and data privacy and security in particular—makes sense.

At the end of the day, data governance is a journey and not a destination. It’s about a) knowing your data and b) managing your data. And there are few factors that contribute to those goals more than data security and data privacy. 

So if you attend this year’s Snowflake Summit in Las Vegas, don’t be surprised if you hear a lot about data governance and how Snowflake can help you tame the data governance beast. You can find out more about the Summit here. Registration is open now. Hope to see you there!