Snowflake and cloud data protection provider Baffle will provide data pipeline security in a new offering to secure data migrations from on-premises legacy data stores to Snowflake for analysis. 

Data sharing is powering businesses but organizations are running into security challenges. According to a new data report from Snowflake and the Economist Intelligence Unit, 64% of businesses struggle to integrate data from varied sources and 42% fear the risk of leaked confidential information as a result of sharing data with or sourcing data from external sources (42%). Other challenges include the risk of data being used for purposes other than intended (41%).

The new service will give customers a bring your own key (BYOK) or hold your own key (HYOK) capability to prevent external parties from seeing or decrypting data. This is paramount to being able to reclaim or revoke access to data, according to Baffle.

At least 75% of the world's data is projected to move to cloud and into cloud data analytics platforms, according to Gartner. “Snowflake’s going to have a huge hand in that,” Harold Byun, VP of products and marketing at Baffle, said. “Customers have recognized that and, quite frankly, asked us [Baffle] straight out when we were going to support Snowflake. So that's the effort we undertook.”

The five-year-old Santa Clara, California-based company simplifies data protection and data privacy to mitigate the risk of data breaches. Baffle’s data security mesh removes the need for any code modification to simplify protection of the actual data values. It serves as an invisible layer to control data flow from any data source and effectively protects the data values sitting within any data repository. 

“We're helping organizations move more data to cloud faster,” Byun said.

Moving data from point A to point B requires a ton of data pipeline engineering and transformation work, Byun explained. This is largely in part due to referential integrity and dependencies between the data relations in on-premises legacy data structures that are typically dropped when migrating to the cloud. 

But moving data into the cloud and properly transforming it takes migration to an entirely different level of complexity. “Existing solutions today have basically required customers to create multiple clones of the data, transform, de-identify the data, and then move it to the cloud, adding an additional three or four steps to the process,” Byun said. Baffle, by contrast, is a point and shoot operation, removing all of the operational overhead and data engineering work, he added. 

Users can selectively re-identify data migrating from on-premises legacy structures into flexible cloud infrastructure with access control permissions that are targeted at specific values. For Snowflake customers, this means underlying data values remain encrypted with a customer owned key that is outside of the Snowflake environment.

The business of selling data is nothing new, as it is often shared freely between business partners. But this growing recognition of the value of data means that more organizations are buying and selling it, too. it. In the past six months, 94% of organizations have purchased data and 82% have sold data at least once, the Snowflake report found.

Cloud infrastructure providers, such as Snowflake, specify a shared responsibility model where the cloud vendor does not take responsibility for data in the cloud and only takes responsibility for the infrastructure.

The notion behind BYOK or HYOK gives customers the right of data revocation. If a customer decides they never want their data to be decrypted in a cloud environment, they can simply destroy the key. Within the compliance guidelines of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and other regulations that have passed, Byun explained there is this notion of the right to be forgotten and independently revoke access to data.

Folding Baffle’s security capabilities into the Snowflake data warehouse takes the cloud data platform provider one step closer to bringing the Data Cloud to reality. Snowflake introduced the concept of the Data Cloud over the summer. It’s an ecosystem of partners, customers, data providers, and data service providers that can share data through the Snowflake Cloud Data Platform and, particularly, that platform’s Secure Data Sharing technology.