Informatica Expands Data Governance Support For The Snowflake Data Cloud

Tighter links with Snowflake for Informatica’s data governance, data quality management and data integration tools will create opportunities for system integration partners in business analytics and digital transformation projects.

Informatica is stepping up its strategic alliance with cloud data platform company Snowflake, offering new data cataloging and governance capabilities that businesses and organizations can use to better manage their data assets stored on the Snowflake Data Cloud.

Informatica is also offering expanded data staging and integration capabilities for the Snowflake system as part of its Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) portfolio.

For solution providers who work with Informatica and Snowflake, especially global and regional systems integration partners, the new offerings present increased service opportunities to work with their customers and help them manage their big data initiatives and projects.

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“Data governance is really front and center,” said Rik Tamm-Daniels, Informatica vice president of strategic ecosystems and technology, speaking about the Informatica announcement in an interview with CRN.

“This is one of the big themes we’ve seen gain tremendous momentum in 2020. And looking at 2021, it will be a dominant trend in the demand for trusted data,” Tamm-Daniels said. “Data has become the soul or the lifeblood of digital transformation. But it only works if there is trusted data there.”

Data governance practices includes data discoverability, data protection, data management policies for ensuring compliance with regulations such as the European GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and California’s CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), and practices for providing users with access to data.

While data governance was once seen as something businesses had to implement to comply with government regulations, that’s changed over the last several years, said Richard Ganley, Informatica senior vice president of global alliances and digital transformation solutions, in the interview with CRN.

“Today, in most of the deals we are doing, people are thinking now of data governance as really an enabler for business, using data governance to serve up high-quality, trusted data to the whole organization” for self-service business analytics and other initiatives, Ganley said. That, he added, presents “a huge opportunity” for systems integration partners.

Snowflake, who’s blockbuster IPO in August caught everyone’s attention, offers a portfolio of data warehouse, data lake, data engineering, data science, data application and data exchange services. Businesses use tools like Informatica’s Intelligent Cloud Services, Cloud Data Integration and Cloud Mass Ingestion to prepare data, move it to the Snowflake Data Cloud and manage it once it’s there.

Informatica and Snowflake have a strategic alliance – Snowflake named Informatica its Data Lake Partner of the Year – and the two have more than 200 joint customers including Total Gas and Paycor, according to Informatica.

“Snowflake’s single, integrated platform paired with Informatica’s AI-driven automation for the intelligent data platform provides a joint solution to help customers mobilize their data for data-driven business decisions,” said Colleen Kapase, Snowflake’s vice president of worldwide partners and alliances, in a statement. “We look forward to continuing to expand our joint capabilities and empower customers with the tools they need to accelerate their digital transformations.”

Informatica’s data governance software lineup includes the Axon Data Governance, Enterprise Data Catalog, Data Quality, Cloud Data Quality and Privacy Management tools.

Informatica now offers enterprise-scale data governance, data quality management and data cataloging capabilities for the Snowflake platform. They allow businesses and organizations to catalog existing data assets to identify relevant and trusted data to move to Snowflake and track data as it is moved into the Snowflake system and used.

Customers using Informatica and Snowflake jointly can also cleanse data to ensure its accuracy for business analytics and AI initiatives, and manage and protect data assets to meet internal data governance policies and regulations such as the European GDPR and California CCPA.

Informatica also has extended the capabilities of its Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services integration platform-as-a-service to help businesses load files, databases and streaming data into Snowflake on a large scale using the Cloud Mass Ingestion Service. Customers also can utilize the Snowflake engine and the pushdown optimization functionality in IICS to speed up data transformation and enrichment.

Last month’s launch of Informatica’s fall 2020 edition included a number of new capabilities that also aid customers working with Snowflake including new serverless data integration, data asset analysis, and a “customer 360” portal and other functionality that offers views into customer behavior and customer data patterns.