June of 2021 was a big month for Alation. Not only did we announce having raised $110M in funding at a $1.2B valuation, we also advanced our partnership with Snowflake. Together, Snowflake and Alation help joint customers easily search, discover, analyze, and govern data. In June, Alation was recognized by Snowflake for excellence in data governance with the 2021 Data Governance Partner of the Year Award.

Alation encourages wide-scale collaboration and enables everyone in an organization to think “data first” before making decisions.  Both are key components for driving data culture. But, in the push to become more data driven, data governance concerns tend to slow progress.

To overcome these obstacles for Snowflake customers, we’ve built our Active Data Governance Capability for Snowflake. It enhances trust and confidence in data, mitigates risk, and increases business performance. This allows joint customers to solve problems using trusted, governed data while breaking down silos.

Governance and Insights at Texas Mutual

Most organizations struggle to ease data access while maintaining proper controls and oversight. Texas Mutual Insurance Company was no exception. Now, however, Alation + Snowflake helps this global insurer support their data governance strategy while empowering better decision-making, informing risk management, and enabling its data users to navigate complex regulatory environments.

Our joint solution helped Texas Mutual increase operational insights and agility within weeks, powering an 80% acceleration in delivering business dashboards to decision makers. In such a highly regulated industry, where the pressure to adapt continues to increase, this massive gain in speed provides a huge competitive advantage.

How Alation + Snowflake Keeps Data Flowing

Every company is looking to overcome challenges caused by growing data volumes and the accelerating pace of business. Moving to a data lake provides easier access, but data governance can impede rapid business decisions. At its worst, governance can turn your data lake into a data swamp – making data to unusable

But data governance, at its best, must reduce risk and enforce compliance while also easing access. Alation removes obstacles to access with active data governance; our governance approach highlights trusted data to keep data workflows moving, all while syncing with Snowflake’s Data Cloud ecosystem — which ensures all cloud data is both governed and accessible. Your teams can then collaborate on trusted data to make faster, better decisions.

3 Powerful Use Cases

Keeping data flowing offers the benefits of active data governance, empowers more productive analysis, and supports easier data migrations.

• Alation + Snowflake enables active data governance that adapts to your business by connecting technical metadata with business data. Stewards can then easily build glossaries and descriptions, monitor data quality, control access, and protect sensitive data.
• Alation + Snowflake boosts productivity by empowering data scientists and analysts to quickly find and analyze the right Alation catalogs all data in Snowflake, adding the critical business context of labels, lineage, and top users to give data scientists and analysts confidence and speed. Collaboration capabilities empower folks to innovate with data together.
• Alation + Snowflake accelerates data migrations. Alation discovers the best data, so you only migrate what matters (and leave the junk behind). Alation also catalogs the interdependencies of legacy data to ensure it’s moved, understood, and usable once it gets to the cloud.

Alation + Snowflake for You

Needless to say, it’s an incredible honor to be recognized by Snowflake as Data Governance Partner of the Year for 2021. Snowflake boasts a vibrant and impressive partner ecosystem, so to join this community of leaders in data is both thrilling and humbling.

We are not done yet! Big things lie ahead! We’re working ceaselessly to ensure our joint customers get the most value from data while keeping it effectively governed. And we’re excited to share more innovation — particularly around data governance — soon.

If you’re a Snowflake customer interested in data governance, download the Alation and Snowflake Integration Guide to learn more.