Snowflake Announces New Features to Mobilize the World’s Data in the Data Cloud

 Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW), creator of the Data Cloud, announced new features that will deliver even more value for customers. The Data Cloud is a global network where thousands of organizations mobilize data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. Inside the Data Cloud, organizations can unite their siloed data, easily discover and securely share governed data, and execute diverse analytic workloads. The new features announced today will enable Snowflake customers to work with more types of data, have a more powerful developer experience, deliver more control over data, and access data services just as easy it is to access data within the Data Cloud. 

 The speed at which data is generated continues to increase but the proliferation of data silos means organizations can access only a small proportion of data inside or outside their businesses. Snowflake created the Data Cloud to unlock the value of data by eliminating on-premises and cloud-generated data silos created within organizations and across their subsidiaries, business ecosystems, geographies, and the one or more public cloud providers they use.  

“Data is central to how we run our lives, businesses, and institutions,” Snowflake Co-Founder and President of Products, Benoit Dageville said. “Many of today’s organizations still struggle to mobilize all of their data in service of their enterprise. The Data Cloud contains a massive amount of data from Snowflake customers and commercial data providers, creating a powerful global data network effect for mobilizing data to drive innovation and create new revenue streams.”  

Today, Snowflake announced new features, including: 

Snowpark – A new developer experience that will allow data engineers, data scientists, and developers to write code in their languages of choice, using familiar programming concepts, and then execute workloads such as ETL/ELT, data preparation, and feature engineering on Snowflake. This simplifies an organization’s IT architecture by bringing more data pipelines into Snowflake’s single, governed core data platform. By doing so, data professionals seamlessly leverage the scalability, performance, security, and near-zero maintenance benefits of Snowflake. Snowpark will enable developers to leverage existing skill sets, improve team productivity, reduce cost with fewer systems in a customer’s architecture, and extend Snowflake’s capabilities for additional data engineering and data science use cases. Snowpark is currently available in testing environments only. 

Data Services on Snowflake Data Marketplace – Snowflake Data Marketplace enables any Snowflake customer to discover and access live, ready-to-query, third-party data sets from more than 100 data providers, without needing to copy files or move the data. Announced today, the marketplace now also features data service providers. A Snowflake Data Marketplace user can create live, secure, and bi-directional access to the data they want a service provider to perform a range of data enrichment services on, such as running risk assessments on a customer’s data, augmenting a data set with behavioral scoring, or simply outsourcing the more advanced analysis such as predictive and prescriptive data analysis. 

Unstructured Data – The portion of the world's data that is unstructured is quickly increasing. In addition to structured and semi-structured data, Snowflake announced support for unstructured data such as audio, video, pdfs, imaging data and more – which will provide the ability to orchestrate pipeline executions of that data. Unstructured data management in Snowflake means customers will be able to avoid accessing and managing multiple systems, deploy fine-grained governance over unstructured files and metadata, and discover new revenue opportunities thanks to gaining more complete insights. This feature is currently in private preview. 

Row Access Policies – Customers will be able to advance their data governance across all data objects and workloads in Snowflake. Row access policies will give Snowflake customers the ability to create policies for restricting returned result sets when queries are executed. By creating an umbrella policy to restrict access, users will no longer need to worry about ensuring their queries contain all the right constraints, and security administrators can ensure policies are applied across all workloads running on the platform. For example, an organization's security team can easily implement a policy that returns to its sales reps only the rows of customer data they need to see and not customer data associated with other sales reps. Row access policies are designed to mitigate risk, improve governance, and help organizations better adhere to regional and industry-specific data privacy regulations. Snowflake’s row access policies feature is expected to be in private preview later this year. 

“Snowflake’s platform enables organizations to leverage the power of the Data Cloud regardless of which supported public cloud they use, or where an organization’s data or users are located,” Snowflake’s Senior Vice President of Product, Christian Kleinerman said. “The new features announced today are another example of Snowflake’s commitment to delivering the technology customers need to fully mobilize their data and achieve meaningful business value.”