For a long time, a big pain point for customers using infrastructure from multiple cloud providers — that is, most customers — was determining an effective way of sharing data and transferring information between different cloud platforms. Many organizations stepped in to develop products for cross-cloud data transfer, but security issues remained a concern for businesses dealing with regulated or confidential data.
Cue the data clean room, a reliable resource for companies to share sensitive data with external partners and customers.
Now, Snowflake has built on the data clean room model with an enterprise-grade service for cross-cloud collaboration that it hopes will revolutionize the way companies can share and collaborate on their most sensitive data assets securely. Snowflake’s big goal: remove the technical barriers to building and developing data clean rooms at scale.
Snowflake Data Clean Rooms
The new application is called Snowflake Data Clean Rooms. It’s generally available to customers in AWS East, AWS West, and Azure West regions. The app enables users to build and deploy data clean rooms in Snowflake quickly and intuitively.
The launch of the Snowflake Data Clean Rooms app comes on the back of Snowflake’s acquisition of Samooha in December 2023. Samooha, along with its data clean room development capabilities, has now been integrated into the Snowflake Data Cloud. With this integration comes a range of enhancements to the technology via Snowflake Horizon, including unified compliance, security, privacy, interoperability, and access capabilities. Snowflake users can benefit from the technology with no additional license fee.
“Data Clean Rooms have become a staple across industries in the face of third-party cookie deprecation and Snowflake is uniquely positioned to help marketers across the ecosystem realize the benefits of secure, cloud-agnostic data collaboration,” said Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, Samooha Co-Founder and Snowflake Data Clean Rooms Director of Product Management. “Snowflake Data Clean Rooms allow customers to unlock high-value business outcomes with their data, all while ensuring data stays private and secure.”
Breaking Down Barriers
The Snowflake Data Clean Rooms app promises to democratize the ability to build and benefit from data clean room technology. In most cases, only large companies with access to experts in the field of data privacy could afford to build data clean rooms until now.
With this new release from Snowflake, the breadth of companies that can benefit from the quick and easy deployment of data clean rooms has grown considerably. And, the application is designed for both technical and non-technical users, who can navigate the application via a simple interface and industry-specific workflows and templates.
Snowflake Data Clean Rooms are an important expansion in Snowflake’s product lineup, taking full advantage of the interoperability of the Snowflake Data Cloud. What this collaborative access to sensitive data brings is new opportunities for deep analysis and, ultimately, better business insights.
Without an affordable and manageable application to create data clean rooms, the opportunity to drive innovations through data from every connected source was a luxury only available to the organizations with the budgets to deploy it. Now, with Snowflake Data Clean Rooms, Snowflake is democratizing this technology in two critical ways: cost and accessibility.
