Snowflake enhances platform with AI & security features

Snowflake has announced advancements to its platform that are designed to assist enterprises in managing their data and AI environments.

The company's platform provides a unified, fully managed service that integrates various data architectures, including enterprise data lake, data warehouse, data lakehouse, and data mesh. This service aims to eliminate the complexity and maintenance burdens for its users.

Snowflake's platform enhancements offer increased interoperability and allow organisations to choose the most suitable data architecture while maintaining compliance, security, and collaboration capabilities provided by the Snowflake Horizon Catalog.

James Malone, Head of Data Storage and Engineering at Snowflake, stated, "We give enterprises the power of choice when it comes to their data estates, and our industry-leading platform and governance capabilities serve as the data foundation for organisations to build powerful AI apps and models at scale, all with complete control and flexibility over their data."

As part of the advancements, the Snowflake Open Catalog, now generally available, allows users to integrate new engines while maintaining consistent governance controls. Vineet Gorhe, Chief Technology Officer at DemandHelm, commented, "Snowflake Open Catalog gives our global teams the flexibility to integrate all of our tools in one place, with comprehensive read and write support from various engines, while maintaining the unified governance we depend on to effectively manage our open data lakehouse."

In addition to expanding architectural flexibility, Snowflake has made AI-driven insights more accessible with the availability of Document AI on AWS and Microsoft Azure. This service leverages Snowflake's large language model, Arctic-TILT, to extract information from documents. Organisations like Florida State University and Intelycare already use Document AI to derive insights from unstructured data.

To further assist organisations, Snowflake is offering new Storage Lifecycle Policies and is continuing to simplify migrations from legacy database systems with its SnowConvert tool. These features are intended to improve data management costs and simplify compliance procedures.

Snowflake has also introduced new features in the Horizon Catalog to enhance security, including credential theft prevention via Leaked Password Protection and the upcoming support for Programmatic Access Tokens. A Threat Intelligence Scanner Package has been made generally available, offering insights into user risks and suggesting mitigations.

On the use of the Horizon Catalog for safeguarding data, Morten Lileng, Global Head of Merkury Engineering at Merkle, a dentsu company, noted, "As a leading customer experience transformation consultancy, Merkle relies on the Snowflake Horizon Catalog's robust governance and advanced security monitoring capabilities to safeguard our customers' most sensitive data, preventing unauthorised access and data exfiltration between internal teams, allowing the right people to have access to the right information at the right time."

These developments are part of Snowflake's ongoing efforts to streamline data architecture, governance, and security while facilitating the construction of AI applications at scale.