Snowflake Calls for Security Caution, Updates Enterprise Data Platform

SNOWFLAKE DATA CLOUD SUMMIT — In the wake of last week's breach of Ticketmaster, a Snowflake customer, the cloud data giant is asking partners and customers to be proactive in watching for "increased cyber threat activity" and to prevent unauthorized access.

The federal Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a warning as well.

"We believe this is the result of ongoing industry-wide, identity-based attacks with the intent to obtain customer data," the company wrote in its community forum. "Research indicates that these types of attacks are performed with our customers’ user credentials that were exposed through unrelated cyber threat activity. To date, we do not believe this activity is caused by any vulnerability, misconfiguration or malicious activity within the Snowflake product. Throughout the course of our ongoing investigation, we have promptly informed the limited number of customers who we believe may have been impacted."

The company had no further comment onsite for Channel Futures at its annual user conference in San Francisco.

It was reported that malicious hackers were able to get names, phone numbers, email addresses, payment card information, ticket sales information and more in the Ticketmaster breach. Snowflake previously said threat actors were able to access a former employee's demo account, but it was not connected to the company's production or corporate systems.

Snowflake Enterprise Data Platform Update

Meantime, among a flurry of announcements from Snowflake on day two of Snowflake Data Cloud Summit were enhancements to its unified enterprise data platform.

Central to the upgrades are more flexibility and interoperability for organizations, regardless of where their data resides. With the improvements, the cloud data giant wants to make it easier for customers to discover and collaborate on the data, models and applications they need. The powerful platform enhancements also give users better performance and efficiency in the AI Data Cloud.

Snowflake's Prasanna Krishnan

“Snowflake is making customers’ data, models and applications even more powerful by embracing open data and interoperability across the ecosystem, ensuring that all users benefit from Snowflake’s leading governance and discovery in the AI Data Cloud,” said Prasanna Krishnan, head of collaboration and Snowflake Horizon, Snowflake. “We’re providing customers with new ways to seamlessly access, understand, protect and drive value with their data at the speed and scale they need to be successful.”

Meantime, Snowflake is updating Snowflake Horizon, its built-in governance and discovery solution, to help enterprises protect their data products so customers can take action on them, both for their internal content and that sourced from third parties. New Snowflake Horizon capabilities include an internal marketplace in private preview. It allows users to curate and publish data products such as data, models and applications specifically for teams within their organization to discover and use — while preventing unintended sharing to external parties.

Also on Tuesday, Snowflake introduced innovations and enhancements to Cortex AI, its fully managed service that enables organizations to analyze data and build AI applications, all within Snowflake. They include new chat experiences, a new no-code interactive interface and access to large language models (LLMs).

Furthermore, Snowflake introduced new tools and innovations that accelerate how developers build enterprise-grade pipelines, models and applications with their data. The company is trying to eliminate complexity for customers with new developer tooling and native integrations that speed up development, while empowering them to efficiently ship more advanced products in the AI Data Cloud.