Writing about Snowflake in July seems ironic, and a heatwave in Antarctica also sounds unlikely. Similarly, who thought that banks and other organizations would willingly hand over their valuable and sensitive data to a third party to manage? As of April 2021, organizations are running more than 50% of their workloads in the cloud. Moreover, by 2025, according to a market research report, many companies that had invested in on-premises data warehouse systems are now looking to shift to the cloud. The reason is that cloud storage is more cost-effective, however, cloud data breaches are not likely to decline. And this is the core of the partnership between Snowflake and Voltage (part of CyberRes – a Micro Focus line of business.)
Why Voltage SecureData plus Snowflake? Because Snowflake’s native security may not be enough. The Snowflake platform provides layered security options including network security, identity and access management, transparent disk encryption, TLS, and standard data-at-rest encryption. However, Voltage SecureData adds important data-centric protection that enhances Snowflake’s security in several critical ways:
- Format-preservation for the usability of data in its protected form
- Data security controls for data privacy regulation compliance
- Persistent protection enabling multi-cloud and data sharing strategies
- The flexibility of standards-validated and independently assessed techniques
- Safe Unicode support for all alphabets
Data protection can be done on-premises before uploading to the cloud, or as it is moved into the cloud and a variety of tools can be used to move this data into Snowflake. These are all existing or possible integration points for Voltage SecureData to invoke format-preserving encryption if Voltage SecureData has not already protected the data on-premises. Again, the data protection that Voltage SecureData provides is both persistent and platform-agnostic, it supports a data protection strategy that is enterprise-wide and multi-cloud, with the ability to protect data in one place and then unprotect that data in a different place, such as in a completely different cloud altogether.
To sum up, Voltage SecureData is platform-agnostic and protects persistently allowing customers to protect data before, when, or any time after it lands in Snowflake. In addition, customers can do cloud analytics in Snowflake and share data securely both inside and outside of Snowflake with the knowledge the sensitive data is protected from prying eyes, whether inside or outside the company. In other words, Voltage SecureData for Snowflake enables you to lock down your sensitive data but still unlock the value in that data at scale.
