Silos complicate effective governance and discovery
With the advent of generative AI and large language models (LLMs), enterprises are racing to unlock as much business value as possible from their data assets, including apps and models. Unfortunately, these data assets are often locked away in silos across multiple cloud service providers and solutions, as well as across different partner, customer and vendor ecosystems. As the number of silos increases, discovery and democratized access becomes really hard, and managing the associated security risks and costs of moving data assets between different systems with different governance models becomes extremely complex.
Simplify governance and discovery at scale with Snowflake Horizon Catalog
A core goal of Snowflake from the beginning has been to break down data silos and make all data available in a simple, consistent manner. However, making it easy to access data is not enough: It must be easy to find data, easy to collaborate and easy to govern all of an organization’s data. These insights inspired us to build Snowflake Horizon Catalog.
With the Horizon Catalog, we sought to build a catalog that reflects our relentless pursuit of simplicity and uniformity. At the core of the Horizon Catalog is a unified, global repository for the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, which includes structured, semi-structured and unstructured data; models; Snowflake Notebooks; Streamlit; Snowflake Native Apps; and listings. On top of this repository, we built a suite of capabilities around the following five themes:
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Security: The Horizon Catalog is built on a powerful security foundation of strong network security, robust identity management and authentication — coupled with continuous risk monitoring and protection through the Trust Center. In addition, centralized role-based access control (RBAC) across clouds helps you ensure that data is protected from the time it lands to the time it is consumed.
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Compliance: The Horizon Catalog provides tools for customers to ensure that access to data is controlled and audited, that data is high-integrity and that data is used for appropriate purposes through capabilities such as auto-classification for sensitive data detection; granular authorization policies to protect data, such as through tag-based masking and dynamic data masking; and Data Quality Monitoring and Data Lineage Visualization.
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Privacy: Organizations often limit data use due to privacy considerations. Horizon Catalog’s advanced privacy features, such as Synthetic Data Generation, Differential Privacy Policies and Snowflake Data Clean Rooms, enable data analytics and collaboration while preserving privacy, opening up new possibilities.
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Discovery: Users must be able to find the data, apps and models they need, understand them and seamlessly access them. The Horizon Catalog provides seamless discovery of content (data, apps and models) operating on data regardless of format or location.
- Collaboration: The Horizon Catalog enables secure collaboration with clients and suppliers without moving data, both within and outside the organization. Customers can also enrich and unlock their data with third-party data sets, apps and AI products from Snowflake Marketplace.
