How OvalEdge Supports Snowflake Horizon’s Governance Capabilities

Snowflake Horizon, a built-in governance suite for Snowflake customers, covers every aspect of data governance with native features addressing compliance, data security, privacy, access, and interoperability. With this integrated solution, it's easy for Snowflake customers to deploy actionable governance policies across the entirety of the Snowflake ecosystem.

One crucial aspect of Snowflake Horizon is the critical partnerships that enable Snowflake to integrate unique features into the suite. These advanced governance features are interoperable, enabling joint customers to benefit through seamless integrations. OvalEdge is proud to be a Snowflake Horizon partner, and in this blog, we'll explain the functionality we bring to the Snowflake governance ecosystem.

Related Post: How End-to-End Data Governance in Snowflake Supports Business Agility

AI-Powered Access Management

OvalEdge technology supports data access management on the Snowflake platform. Building on Snowflake's robust access control and data masking features, OvalEdge enables Snowflake users to carry out widespread, department-specific data access processes based on the classification of data assets.

Using OvalEdge's native AI and ML tools, individual departments can initiate automated classification policies that mask data based on specific attributes. For particularly sensitive data sets, OvalEdge provides a self-service shopping cart experience for data access management. With OvalEdge Access Cart, Snowflake users can request access to specific data assets and send that request for approval.

OvalEdge also enables users to automatically identify sensitive fields using the following approach:

1. AI-driven recommendation engine identifies sensitive fields
2. Users set up masking policies
3. Masking policies are synched with Snowflake
4. Users set up tag-based policies
5. Tag-based policies are synched with Snowflake

OvalEdge operates in line with Snowflake’s native privacy features by listing access history and with its access policies by providing support for object exploration, object tagging, a data governance interface, auto-classification, and custom classification.

Data Security

Another element of data access that OvalEdge brings to Snowflake is security. OvalEdge integrates with Snowflake’s existing data security provisions by supporting all current authorization controls, including RBAC, row access policies, masking policies, tag-based masking, dynamic data masking, conditional masking, and external tokenization. As well as providing horizontal and vertical classification tools, OvalEdge brings three other core data access security features:

• Roles and responsibilities: OvalEdge supports two-way syncing of user roles and permissions in Snowflake. This critical feature enables organizations to delegate roles that have various responsibilities and access privileges.

• Role-based masking: OvalEdge enables Snowflake users to protect data through role-based masking. This process of masking or restricting data based on roles is completed at the source before assets are moved into the Snowflake data warehouse.

• Monitoring: OvalEdge uses AI to automatically detect and send an approval request to the appropriate stakeholder whenever a new data element enters a company's data catalog. This ensures data access controls are monitored consistently.

Data Literacy

Another element of OvalEdge's end-to-end data governance platform that benefits Snowflake users is its comprehensive data literacy program. Snowflake users can connect to the OvalEdge data catalog to crawl, categorize, and tag all of their data. This process makes data discoverable, along with collaboration features, and enables regular business users to do more with data as they become increasingly literate.

Data Quality Improvement

The OvalEdge data quality management program focuses on the entire lifecycle of your data, making it consistently trustworthy and actionable. Snowflake customers can leverage these data quality improvement capabilities using Snowflake's processing power. OvalEdge is SOC 2 Type II certified and supports compliance through its data quality monitoring and lineage features.

Related Post: Best Practices for Improving Data Quality

How Does OvalEdge Interact with Snowflake?

OvalEdge integrates with Snowflake through a connector. In practice, this works by integrating the snowflake data source via a JDBC driver that supports a variety of functions, including crawling database objects, profiling sample data, query execution, building lineage, remote policy, and access permissions.

In regards to access management in particular, OvalEdge provides Remote Data Access Management RDAM for Snowflake users, enabling them to access reports and tables from remote systems. Through OvalEdge Access, users can sync the remote access of datasets and manage data access security of Snowflake connectors.