The velocity of change is accelerating. The rate of change businesses are experiencing is just astounding. As many organizations have experienced during the pandemic, especially in their supply chain, the need for the data environment to be able to deliver faster is now mission-critical for all! We need better data—but at a rate that’s much faster than before. Businesses need their data teams to become more responsive to changing data demands. That means they need agility.

Snowflake customers want to discover insights from their data faster than ever, which is challenging because data volumes are growing at a breakneck pace. Effective searches are critical to customer satisfaction. Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of search optimization, which significantly improves the performance of selective queries on large tables.

In a 2020 study performed by Nature Research, 70 different teams of neuroimaging experts were asked to test nine hypotheses by looking at the same MRI data set. You may not be surprised to learn that these teams reached a wide range of different conclusions, in part because no two teams chose identical workflows to analyze the data. With seventy teams, there were 70 different workflows.

Snowflake continued expanding its platform capabilities at the start of the new year, adding updates to data sharing, Snowsight, and data pipelines that help customers and partners access, mobilize, and share their data for better data-driven outcomes. Here’s a brief rundown of some of the exciting announcements from January 2021.

Snowflake met with Jan Doumen, Head of Expertise for Allianz Benelux, and Naveed Memon, Program Director, Data and Analytics for Emirates, at Data Cloud Summit 2020. Read excerpts from the conversation to learn how capturing data insights in the Data Cloud brings value to their businesses. Data’s value in the 21st century is often compared to oil’s value in the 18th century. It can transform organizations, opening doors to unprecedented opportunities.

inReality provides an analytics platform that leverages IoT sensor data (for example, visual technologies) to bring operational excellence and exceptional customer experiences to all types of venues. The company’s clients range from public schools to major telecommunication companies with the goal being to make their spaces more secure and efficient, to solve problems, and to create better experiences for their patrons.

You may have read about Snowflake’s IPO last year. But you probably didn’t hear about all the work that the Snowflake security team did in preparation. Our corporate security program went through a security analytics review to ensure that it satisfied the new security policy requirements resulting from the IPO. Here are a few lessons that we learned when setting up automated security control validation on our Snowflake security data lake.

Snowflake recently launched dynamic data masking, an incredibly useful feature for companies and data-centric organizations that have strict security data governance requirements. This article demonstrates how we implemented data masking at Snowflake by introducing a data masking policy on a VARIANT data type field that holds data in JSON format. We implemented the policy on top of tables and views.

Today’s Data Privacy Day offers consumers an opportunity to learn about how companies use, collect, and share their personal information. At the same time, it gives companies a chance to focus on and highlight how they are protecting customer data. Although most businesses view data privacy practices as a way to mitigate their risk, good practices around data privacy can actually differentiate your organization from your competitors.

Today, Snowflake is announcing the general availability (GA) of the External Tables feature. Snowflake launched the External Tables feature for public preview at the Snowflake Summit in June 2019. It is one of the key features of the data lake workload in the Snowflake Data Cloud.