Snowflake Horizon: Governance & Catalog Features

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

Snowflake Horizon Compliance Workflows Automation

Snowflake Horizon enables seamless compliance workflows automation by integrating built-in object tagging, metadata classification, and policy enforcement within the Snowflake AI Data Cloud. This automation accelerates insurers’ ability to comply with regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and Solvency II by providing real-time data lineage tracking and audit-ready reports.

To explore governance implementations, visit 

Data Governance in the Insurance Industry

Secure Data Sharing with Snowflake Horizon

Snowflake Horizon supports secure data sharing through Data Clean Rooms and private listings that allow collaboration without exposing sensitive raw data, ensuring privacy and regulatory compliance during inter- and intra-organization data sharing. This feature significantly enhances trust and data security among insurance partners and stakeholders.

Learn more about secure collaboration at 

Data Governance Tools for Insurance Industry

OvalEdge Integration for Snowflake Governance

OvalEdge’s integration with Snowflake Horizon elevates governance capabilities by providing unified metadata cataloging, automated impact analysis, and stewardship workflows. This partnership extends policy automation and compliance management seamlessly within Snowflake deployed environments, ensuring comprehensive control and observability over insurance data assets.

Detailed insights available at 

OvalEdge Integration for Snowflake Governance

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

Granular Access Control in Snowflake Horizon

Granular access controls in Snowflake Horizon empower insurers to enforce column-level and row-level security policies using dynamic Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and tag-based masking policies. These controls minimize unauthorized access risk and help safeguard personally identifiable and sensitive policyholder information.

Related discussions on access management can be found in 

Secure Data Access in Insurance Organizations

Continuous Data Quality Monitoring in Snowflake

Continuous data quality monitoring within Snowflake Horizon leverages built-in and customizable quality metrics, providing alerts on data anomalies and breaches in quality thresholds. This proactive monitoring supports reliable insurance claims processing, underwriting, and actuarial analysis, enhancing overall data trustworthiness.

Best practices for data quality improvement discussed in 

Improving Data Quality in Insurance Sector

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.

FAQs

Q1. How does Snowflake Horizon automate compliance workflows?
Snowflake Horizon automates governance by embedding policy enforcement, tagging, and audit trails directly within the data cloud framework.

Q2. What secure data sharing mechanisms does Snowflake Horizon provide?
Features like Data Clean Rooms and private listings enable privacy-preserving data collaboration internally and externally.

Q3. How does OvalEdge enhance Snowflake Horizon governance?
OvalEdge adds unified metadata management, impact analyses, and stewardship workflows for robust compliance within Snowflake and many more.

Q4. What granular access controls are available in Snowflake Horizon?
Row- and column-level security, RBAC, and tag-based masking offer precise and dynamic access restrictions critical for insurance data.

Q5. How is continuous data quality monitored in Snowflake Horizon?
Proactive alerts based on data metrics help maintain reliability essential for insurance decisions and regulatory compliance.