Announcing Okera for Snowflake, a SaaS Solution to Deliver Universal Data Authorization on Snowflake’s Data Cloud

Okera also enhances native support for new and advanced Snowflake capabilities including Worksheets and Snowsight

Okera, the Universal Data Authorization company, announced Okera for Snowflake, a new software as a service (SaaS) offering for the Snowflake Data Cloud that will be exclusively available on AWS in 2022. The company also announced that the latest version of its flagship solution, the Okera Dynamic Access Platform (ODAP), now has enhanced end-to-end native integration with Snowflake.

Okera for Snowflake will provide the same powerful data authorization and audit capabilities as ODAP, but as a SaaS application packaged and priced for Snowflake. Designed to remove technical complexity while still delivering exceptional data security performance, the solution gives all data stakeholders the opportunity to collaboratively build dynamic data privacy and security policies, automatically enforce those policies, and continuously monitor access to sensitive data.

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Both Okera for Snowflake and ODAP natively integrate with Snowflake in a way that eliminates the compromises, complexities, and sluggishness associated with other approaches to data access governance. Data teams can deliver business value faster and more confidently, while data security and privacy teams can validate the appropriate security mandates and data privacy regulations are implemented as intended.

“We’re proud to partner with Snowflake and support their vision for the Data Cloud. Okera simplifies policy management so data teams can quickly and safely provision access to sensitive data,” said John Marchese, Okera’s Vice President of Global Alliances & Partner Sales Channels. “Okera’s dynamic, blink-of-an-eye policy authorization, combined with Snowflake native push-down policy enforcement, delivers a superior user experience that makes it easy for organizations to use data responsibly.”

“Our customers have made it clear that data governance is now a top priority for their organizations and a key requirement of the data platforms they invest in,” said Tarik Dwiek, Head of Technology Alliances at Snowflake. “Our partnership with Okera enables us to deliver the governance capabilities our customers need. We continue to be impressed with the vision and execution of the Okera team and the value they deliver to our joint customers.”

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“Okera’s data authorization platform, with fine-grained access control, enables DataOps.live to ensure that every data pipeline reliably and consistently applies the agreed data security tags on sensitive data elements to ensure that proper tokenization or masking occurs from within Snowflake,” said Justin Mullen, CEO of DataOps.live. “This new integration guarantees that Okera will always prevent inappropriate access to confidential, personally identifiable, and regulated data, because the data security tags are applied and reapplied every time every pipeline is run, whether in development, test or production environments. Human error removed!”

Okera’s support for native Snowflake capabilities include: 

• Snowflake native SQL syntax – Okera provides complete end-to-end support for the Snowflake native SQL syntax, making the full power of the Snowflake Data Cloud available for all user queries.
• Snowflake Worksheets and Snowsight: With Okera’s data authorization capabilities, data governance teams can more quickly and confidently grant power users the privilege of running native Snowflake queries directly in the Snowflake web interface.
• Snowflake Connectors: Combined with support for Snowflake’s native SQL syntax, Okera works with native JDBC/ODBC connectors for the Snowflake Data Cloud. Native connectivity protects investments in business dashboards, reports, and advanced analytics built using third-party BI and other SQL tools.
• Snowpark Accelerated: Okera uses User Defined Functions (UDFs) to implement data security and privacy transformations, such as dynamic data masking and tokenization. Joint customers can also take advantage of the complete Java programming language to create their own UDFs for custom data security use cases and increase speed at run-time.
• Snowflake Object Tagging: As part of the recently introduced Snowflake Data Governance Accelerated Program, Snowflake enables users to apply business context tags that identify data objects as sensitive, PII, or belonging to a cost center. These tags can be automatically synced with Okera for simple, fast, and scalable policy building and dynamic policy enforcement.
• Snowflake Access History: Okera can use Snowflake’s Access History data to incorporate Snowflake’s native audit capability into the Okera platform to provide additional security context for Snowflake data usage, including what tags are being used and by whom. Okera enables the ability to look at data residing within Snowflake and across other data platforms.

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