Announcing Informatica’s Cloud Data Governance and Catalog for Snowflake Horizon

Closing the Gap Between Data-Driven Outcomes and Data Access

Only 19% of organizations have completed building a single source of truth for all critical data domains. Over half of respondents haven’t started yet or are still building and testing solutions.

Forty-two percent of organizations do not believe that all or most of the data they have is available to be used by application developers, data stewards, data engineers, data analysts, data scientists, and business analysts.¹

Why is there such as big gap between the need for trusted data and its use by data consumers? In many organizations, the information value chain for data consumers is slow, cumbersome and requires heavy IT involvement. Data access policies create additional hurdles for the business to access the data they need. When they finally do receive data, it’s often low quality and doesn’t come with the context that data consumers need to understand it and make better business-decisions.

The key to removing these impediments for your business is a comprehensive, end-to-end, automated approach to data governance that connects your data consumers directly to your data producers for the data intelligence that accelerates today’s business outcomes. This allows your data consumers to rapidly discover trusted data assets with the context they need to determine if a given data set is fit for their business use.

Introducing Informatica Cloud Data Governance and Catalog Services Integrations with the Snowflake Data Cloud

Informatica’s end-to-end Intelligent Data Management Cloud™ (IDMC) is the industry's first and most comprehensive AI-driven data management solution. With Informatica Cloud Data Governance and Catalog services, data becomes discoverable through our Cloud Data Marketplace. Data consumers can easily find data and request access in compliance with their organization’s data management and use policies.

Powered by Informatica’s AI-based CLAIRE® engine, IDMC applies industry-leading metadata capabilities with cloud data governance and cloud data marketplace services to accelerate and automate core data management processes. IDMC enables data producers to catalog their data with rich context, including semantic meaning, and improve data quality.

However, there is a “last mile” operational data governance for data delivery component. This is related to who can access what data (access controls) and data protection that is often defined at the cloud data warehouse or cloud data lake level. In a platform such as Snowflake Data Cloud, which can serve as both a data warehouse and a data lake, these types of controls are defined using Snowflake data governance policies and tags. But these capabilities are configured via SQL statements in Snowflake. This requires IT to be in the middle of data producers and data consumers’ requests for data.

That all changes today!

Today, I am pleased to announce that Informatica and Snowflake have released several new features that dramatically accelerate and scale the delivery of data in the Snowflake Data Cloud to data consumers.

Automating the Data Governance Lifecycle

Informatica IDMC cloud data governance and catalog services now enable a new way to define and apply operational data governance policies in Snowflake without writing a single line of code or requiring SQL knowledge. These native integrations help customers seamlessly deploy operational and policy-based data governance to provide an end-to-end automated “supply chain” for data.

These new capabilities include:

• Automatically identify sensitive data assets using 200+ AI-driven semantic type classifications and apply appropriate Snowflake tags and data access policies
• Automatically extend Snowflake tags with semantic types, data quality insights from IDMC, empowering Snowflake users with critical data context

A Single Pane of Glass for Enterprise Data Governance

Informatica’s IDMC Cloud Data Governance and Catalog services are designed to provide data discoverability along with broader data governance across your entire data estate — from on-premises to cloud to multi-cloud. Snowflake tag synchronization and mapping enable enterprises to leverage Snowflake-specific access control and masking policies. They let you link your policies to the enterprise’s global data governance policies and controls. This linking helps ensure a clear view into Snowflake data governance configuration. It helps enable management of all data governance policies and controls — both inside and outside of Snowflake — in a single as-a-service user experience via Informatica IDMC.

With IDMC Cloud Data Governance and Catalog services for Snowflake, you can:

• Synchronize Snowflake tags between Informatica and Snowflake
• Search the Informatica Data Catalog using Snowflake tags
• View how and where Snowflake tags are applied within Snowflake
• View detailed end-to-end column level lineage into and out of Snowflake
• Discover relationships between databases, schemas, columns and tables using Snowflake tags

Summary

One of the biggest challenges enterprises face today is securely scaling the proliferation of trusted data to the right users at the right time for enhanced data intelligence. The new integrations between Informatica IDMC Cloud Data Governance and Catalog services and Snowflake represent a huge leap forward in productivity and time-to-insight for customers. This is accomplished by bringing data consumers and producers together around the Snowflake Data Cloud so they can help transform their organizations with the power of trusted data.

Informatica helps hundreds of Snowflake customers effectively manage and govern their data. As a key Informatica partner, Snowflake relies on solutions like Informatica IDMC cloud data governance and catalog services to enable and align personas.

To learn more and to keep up with the latest Informatica + Snowflake partnership news, check out our partnership page.
 

_{¹Source: IDC White Paper, sponsored by Informatica, “The Current State of Modern Data Management: Building an Intelligent Data Enterprise to Improve Business Outcomes,” (Doc#US49666322, September 2022)}