Snowflake Horizon for Data Governance: Your Complete 2025 Guide

Updated November 26th, 2024

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Snowflake Horizon consolidates and extends data governance capabilities for your Snowflake assets. It helps you govern and discover data, apps, and models in the AI Data Cloud with integrated compliance, security, privacy, interoperability, and access capabilities, extending support to Iceberg tables.
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This article will look into the core capabilities of Snowflake Horizon and explore how a unified control plane like Atlan can enhance them for effective data management and governance.

Table of contents #

  1. What is Snowflake Horizon?
  2. How does Snowflake Horizon handle data governance?
  3. Compliance
  4. Security
  5. Privacy
  6. Discovery
  7. Collaboration
  8. How does Atlan support the data governance capabilities offered by Snowflake Horizon?
  9. Snowflake Horizon: Related reads

What is Snowflake Horizon? #

Snowflake Horizon Catalog is a built-in governance and discovery solution for the Snowflake AI Data Cloud. Diverse data users–data governors and stewards, security admins and CISOs, data teams–can use Snowflake Horizon Catalog to discover and govern data, apps, models, and more.

For instance, data teams can find and collaborate on relevant information faster and extract more value from it. Data stewards can protect data assets at a granular level, while monitoring the security and quality of data from a single built-in solution.

“With Snowflake Horizon, data governors and stewards can quickly uncover and resolve cross-cloud security risks; easily apply out-of-the-box, proven governance protections to sensitive content. In addition, data teams can quickly search, discover, access and share these governed data, apps and models from across their ecosystem.“ - Snowflake blog from June 5, 2024

Snowflake Horizon Catalog

Snowflake Horizon Catalog - Source: Snowflake.

According to Snowflake, Horizon Catalog governs makes the following types of assets discoverable:

  • Data, apps, and models in accounts across your entire organization
  • Data from Apache Iceberg™ tables and external tables
  • Data shared through private listings by trusted partners
  • Publicly available data and every Snowflake Native App from the Snowflake Marketplace
  • Data from third-party applications and data systems brought into Snowflake using connectors

How does Snowflake Horizon handle data governance? #

Snowflake Horizon Catalog’s functionalities fall under five core capabilities:

  1. Compliance to protect and audit your data, apps, and models
  2. Security with continuous risk monitoring, RBAC, and granular authorization
  3. Privacy with aggregation, projection, and differential privacy, and data clean rooms
  4. Discovery to immediately search, discover, and access data, apps, and models
  5. Collaboration without having to move your data

Let’s explore the specifics further.

Snowflake Horizon Catalog: Compliance #

You can understand object dependencies, audit content usage, and safeguard and monitor your data with:

  • Built-in object tagging or classification tags (system-defined and custom)
  • Data & Listing Access History and Schema Change Tracking for audits
  • Built-in and custom data metric functions to monitor data quality
  • Data lineage (in Snowsight) to track the table and column lineage from a source to a target table – get clear clear visibility into data relationships and flows

Lineage tracking in Snowflake Horizon Catalog

Lineage tracking in Snowflake Horizon Catalog - Source: Snowflake.

Snowflake Horizon Catalog: Security #

The goal of security offerings in Snowflake Horizon is to help you safeguard your data and continuously monitor for risks with:

  • Trust Center that streamlines security and compliance monitoring across clouds based on industry best practices
  • Built-in encryption (end-to-end and applicable to data at rest and in transit), authentication (OAuth or federated), network policies, unified RBAC and Listing Discovery Controls
  • Granular data access policies (for databases, schemas, tables, etc.) that offer column and row-level protections

Snowflake Horizon Catalog Trust Center

Snowflake Horizon Catalog Trust Center - Source: Snowflake.

Snowflake Horizon Catalog: Privacy #

Snowflake Horizon’s advanced privacy policies and data clean rooms can help manage and protect sensitive data while allowing data teams to harness its potential. Essential privacy features include:

  • Aggregation and projection policies to control the type of queries to be run against shared data
  • Differential privacy to protect against sophisticated privacy attacks on your data
  • Collaborating on sensitive data with multiple teams inside and outside your organization with Snowflake Data Clean Rooms (DCRs)

“Data Clean Rooms (DCRs) are secure environments that enable multiple organizations (or divisions of an organization) to bring data together for joint analysis under the governed and defined guidelines and restrictions that keep the data secure.” - Senior Partner Sales Engineer Ravi Kumar on Snowflake’s Data Clean Rooms (DCRs)

Privacy features in Snowflake Horizon Catalog

Privacy features in Snowflake Horizon Catalog - Source: Snowflake.

Snowflake Horizon Catalog: Discovery #

With Snowflake Horizon Catalog, you can discover and access data, apps and models from inside and outside your organization. Essential discovery features include:

  • Universal Search to find data, apps, and models using natural language queries
  • An Internal Marketplace to discover organizational listings (i.e., internally available data products)
  • Snowflake Marketplace to browse for publicly available data (from customers and partners, for instance)
  • Object Insights interface (in Snowsight) offering relevant insights about the popularity, access, quality and dependencies of content
  • AI-powered Object Description to automatically add relevant context and comments to tables and views, so that others to more easily curate and discover content

“[Better understand your content with] AI-powered Object Descriptions, which uses AI to allow customers to automatically generate relevant descriptions and comments to tables and views. [Meanwhile,] the Object Insights Interface provides more context by surfacing relevant insights about the popularity, access, quality and dependencies of these objects.” - Snowflake blog from June 5, 2024

Natural language search in Snowflake Horizon Catalog

Natural language search in Snowflake Horizon Catalog - Source: Snowflake blog.

Snowflake Horizon Catalog: Collaboration #

Horizon Catalog empowers you to collaborate securely without moving your data. You can share a single managed copy of data across cloud regions without the need for ETL processes or duplications.

You can also streamline transactions by buying and selling data, applications, and AI products with features like self-service trials, unified billing, and the option to use committed Snowflake spend for payments.

Other essential collaboration features include:

How does Atlan support the data governance capabilities offered by Snowflake Horizon? #

As part of the Snowflake Horizon Partner Ecosystem, Atlan–a unified control plane for data and metadata–supports and extends these capabilities with a pre-built integration to the Snowflake AI Data Cloud. For instance, Atlan uses the Snowflake metadata to provide better context about your data assets.

Other governance capabilities that Atlan supports and extends include:

  • Building a single home for compliance with bi-directional sync of Snowflake Object Tags between Atlan and Snowflake — if you tag assets on Atlan, their status on Snowflake gets automatically updated
  • Driving data adoption with Atlan’s Chrome extension that sits on top of tools like Snowflake, Power BI, Looker, etc. — get all the context you need in one place
  • Maximizing your Snowflake investment by surfacing Account Usage and Information Schema views in Atlan — understand asset usage, queries, etc.
  • Accelerating root cause and impact analysis with column-level, automated, and actionable data lineage

“Atlan’s open API based approach, pay-as-you-go model, and delightful user experience align well with Snowflake’s own ethos, and what customers are demanding from their tools.” - Tarik Dwiek, Head of Global Technology Partnerships at Snowflake

Read more → Snowflake data governance with Atlan

Bottom line #

Snowflake Horizon Catalog simplifies governance, security, privacy, discovery, and collaboration in the Snowflake AI Data Cloud. With features like object tagging, lineage tracking, advanced privacy policies, and AI-powered search, it enables secure and efficient management of data, apps, and models.

Atlan enhances Horizon’s capabilities by offering additional context, automated lineage, and integration with Snowflake metadata, creating a unified and efficient governance framework. Together, Snowflake Horizon and Atlan empower organizations to maximize data value while maintaining strong compliance and control.

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