Snowflake — Cross-Cloud Capabilities with Snowgrid

You must have come across many scenarios, use cases or business requirements where you need to generate data , share or send over to other applications for their consumption.

In a typical implementations, you might have developed and deployed set of jobs, pipelines to generate aggregates or consumer data to be shared either by FTP or ETL jobs etc.

Snowflake data platform makes it easy to share data with secure data sharing however Snowgrid is the layer on top of Snowflake to overcome challenges.

Snowgrid is Snowflake’s cross-cloud technology layer, which interconnects your business’ ecosystems across regions and clouds, enabling you to overcome these challenges and operate at global scale. Snowgrid empowers organizations with one seamless and connected experience across globally distributed teams to collaborate more efficiently, unify governance to comply with regulations, and easily replicate more than just data for increased business continuity.

Snowgrid capabilities cover cross-cloud collaboration, cross-cloud data governance, and cross-cloud business continuity.

Cross-cloud collaboration

Historically, to collaborate on data, users had to move it across environments, grabbing files from FTP servers, scraping APIs, using ETL tools, or setting up different data marts to grant teams access to data. These data pipelines were costly and time-consuming to build and maintain. They were also unsecure, because once the data moved, it was out of the user’s control.

With Snowflake’s Snowgrid technology, organizations can share live, ready-to-query data — along with data services and applications — across clouds and across regions without any ETL.

Snowflake unveiled new enhancements to Snowgrid’s cross-cloud collaboration that increase the flexibility customers have when sharing listings, including:

• Listing Discovery Controls — give data providers fine-grain controls, enabling providers to list data publicly or privately, making it easier to share and collaborate internally and externally while preserving privacy. Providers can customize listings and offer usage-based pricing, while consumers gain greater visibility into listings thanks to usage and query examples and categorizations.
• Cross-Cloud Auto-fulfillment — allows providers to make data immediately accessible and up-to-date for consumers, without manual intervention, regardless of which region or cloud customers are located in. Providers can choose which regions they want to fulfill automatically as demand arises.
• Provider Studio Analytics — gives providers access to robust programmatic and visualized insights to better understand how data listings are accessed and used, which can in turn help providers deliver improved offerings and customer experiences.

Cross-cloud data governance

To achieve governance over an organization’s entire data estate, customers need the ability to know, protect, and connect their data ecosystem. Snowflake’s cross-cloud data governance simplifies governance at scale, ensuring that organizations comply with international regulations and have unified visibility across their ecosystem.

• Tag-based masking, that automates policy assignment to sensitive columns using tags, further strengthening data protection and simplifying policy change management at scale.
• Accelerated searches on data with Masking and Row Access Policies: Search Optimization Service supports tables with masking and row access policies so customers can take full advantage of Snowflake’s performance while maintaining privacy and compliance.

Cross-cloud business continuity

To further simplify global operations, Snowflake announced new enhancements to Snowgrid that enable customers to replicate data and more across clouds and regions, unlocking greater resiliency and minimizing business disruptions in the event of a disaster. These new advancements include:

• Seamless pipeline failover: Snowflake customers can already replicate accounts, databases, policies, and metadata. Now, customers will be able to replicate Streams and Tasks (in public preview), so data pipelines can seamlessly work on secondary Snowflake accounts.
• Streamlined configurations: Customers will be able to easily set up, manage, and failover account replication through an intuitive UI (in private preview), including the ability to streamline configurations for sources, destinations, replication objects, and replication intervals.

Snowgrid and all its capabilities around cross-cloud collaboration, data governance, and business continuity are part of Snowflake’s single, unified platform. For our customers, this means a unified experience across clouds and regions, so you can protect data at cloud scale, operate more efficiently, and collaborate globally in new ways to further mobilize your data.

Hope this blog helps you to understand Snowgrid and its capabilities. Snowflake is not just a data platform its much more than a platform where you can integrate, develop, deploy all types of workloads — Engineering as well as Machine Learning. Snowflake’s Gen AI capabilities, support to Large Language Models (LLMs) is gaining everyone’s attention to leverage and bring best out of their data.

About Me :

I am one of the Snowflake Data Superheroes 2023. I am also one of the Snowflake SnowPro Core SME- Certification Program. I am a DWBI and Cloud Architect! I am currently working as Senior Data Architect — GCP, Snowflake. I have been working with various Legacy data warehouses, Bigdata Implementations, and Cloud platforms/Migrations. I am SnowPro Core certified Data Architect as well as Google certified Google Professional Cloud Architect. You can reach out to me LinkedIn if you need any further help on certification, Data Solutions, and Implementations!