Getting Started with ALTR & Snowflake
Configure ALTR's Snowflake Service User
Connect Snowflake Databases
Connect Columns to ALTR
Creating Policy & Manage Data
Classification
Analytics
Column Access Policies
Views
Thresholds
Row Access Policy
Audit Logs
Settings
Tokenization
Tag-Based Data Masking
Tokenization API
Management API
ALTR Driver JDBC Installation
ALTR Driver ODBC Installation
Configure Tableau to Gain User Level Observability
Integrating ALTR Notifications with AWS S3
TDS Proxy Installation
CDM Installation
Custom Masking and Extensibility Functions
Bring Your Own Key for Tokenization
Open-Source Integrations
ALTR offers a variety of data discovery tools to assist in data discovery and governance, including classification with Google DLP, Data Classification with Snowflake, and metadata management with Snowflake Object Tag Data. These tools enable ALTR users to more easily identify sensitive columnar data and group them via Data Tags for data governance scale.
There are two types of data classification reports that you can choose from to get insight about the type of sensitive data exists in each column. Read on to learn the details that will help you decide which type of report to leverage for your business.
Google DLP Classification enables ALTR users to send a random sample of their data to Google’s DLP service for classification. In a Google DLP Classification, ALTR selects a random sample from each column in your Snowflake database (up to 256 values per column) and sends that sample to Google DLP for analysis. If there is only a limited amount of data available in a column (two times the number of columns in a table), then the column is not classified. Each column is sampled separately to protect the randomness and anonymity of data. Google’s DLP service returns possible classification results to ALTR, which associates those results to the affected columns as Data Tags.
You can access Google DLP results in ALTR via the Google DLP Classification Report tab shown in figure 1.
NOTE
ALTR integrates with Snowflake’s Object Tagging functionality to import any Object Tags available in Snowflake. The following options are available for importing Snowflake Object Tag data into ALTR:
Object Tags are metadata in Snowflake similar to ALTR’s Data Tags that are used to associate particular Snowflake Objects with each other. You can manually define these tags in Snowflake and assign them to column or you can automatically generate these Object Tags through a Snowflake Data Classification.
Snowflake’s Data Classification tool scans through all of the columns in a Snowflake database and attempts to identify what kind of data exists in each column. These result in two Snowflake Object Tags: Semantic Categories, which indicate the specific type of data; and Privacy Categories, which indicate the sensitivity of the data.
If you trigger a Snowflake Classification and Object Tag Integration for a database in ALTR, then ALTR will trigger a Classification for each column in that database and store the resulting Object Tags (and all other object tags available in Snowflake) as Data Tags in ALTR. Running a Snowflake Object Tag Import without a classification will not trigger a new Snowflake Data Classification, but may access any Object Tags created by previous Snowflake classifications.
Note: When performing a Snowflake Data Classification and Object Tag Import, your data stays local inside Snowflake. ALTR does not access the individual values present in your Snowflake Database; it only accesses the resulting metadata.
In ALTR, you can leverage data tags to more easily identify sensitive data and use these identifications to create governance rules at scale.
ALTR enables you to see the results of a Google DLP Classification via the Google DLP Classification Report, which is available in the second tab of the Data Management Page. On the Google DLP Classification Report, you can easily see the most recent Google DLP classification for each database and connect the classified columns with a single click.
ALTR also enables you to view the results of a Snowflake Classification Report. However, be aware you can only view the most recent one per database.
Note: ALTR automatically generates a Friendly Name for columns connected through the Google DLP classification report based on the classification and the column name.
All ALTR customers (regardless of your Free, Enterprise or Enterprise Plus tier plan) can define Column Access Policies on Data Tags, saving significant time from otherwise having to specifying individual columns when creating and updating policies.
GOOGLE DLP CLASSIFICATION
SNOWFLAKE DATA CLASSIFICATION