Snowflake partnered with cloud-security startup Wiz to store, analyze, report, investigate, and consolidate Wiz-generated cloud security events and data into Snowflake’s security data lake for joint customers looking for a unified security data model.

The basis of this collaboration is to build a unified security data model across multicloud environments, which allows customers to have the freedom to choose the best tools and take a proactive approach to cloud security.

Raaz Herzberg, VP of marketing and product strategy at Wiz, explained the integration allows Wiz to push all the information and risks it identifies across a customers’ multicloud model into their Snowflake security data lake, which “enables organizations to consume that data directly in Snowflake, have the ability to look at that data over time, look at trends, and also correlated with the rest of their security information across their organization.”

Omer Singer, head of cybersecurity strategy at Snowflake, noted the vendor is taking a partnership-driven approach to deliver security capabilities to its Data Cloud customers. The focus has been on threat detection and incident response – such as its integration with Hunters and its security operations center (SOC) platform.

But in the cloud environment, Singer argues the more effective approach should be proactively managing risks, reducing vulnerabilities, and locking down configurations to avoid a breach.

Singer explained that Snowflake has seen “a dramatic acceleration in adoption for security data lake architectures” due to broader macroeconomic conditions. “More customers that we talked to today recognize that they need to have a security data lake because it's the only way that they can cost-effectively scale their security program.”

Many large security vendors are pushing for a platform approach to consolidate security tools, but Singer questioned this “best of suite” approach.

“There's a lot of conversation right now about what the future of cybersecurity looks like. Are we going to see dramatic consolidation into a handful of suites that try to solve every problem from within the suite?” he asked. “The reality is the challenges of cybersecurity are only getting harder and more complex. And you're never going to have a single company that can solve all of those challenges. ... In fact, specialization is the key to more successful outcomes with better efficiencies and more automation.”

Singer argues data layer consolidation can allow enterprise security teams to continue to use existing security tools but avoid fragmentation.

“By allowing organizations to consolidate on a single data model it gives them the freedom to make the best selection for every part of their organization and consolidated at the data layer. ... [This] gives them the power that comes with consolidation,” Herzberg added.