Regulated and sovereign markets across the world have stringent requirements stipulating certain important data be kept within geographical borders or even for certain workloads to have dedicated environments, separate from those of other customers. In these markets, organizations need a secure and well-governed data foundation with effective controls to help comply with regulatory requirements.

Historically, Snowflake has supported more than 40 cloud regions across AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. Now, Snowflake is expanding into regulated sovereign markets through platform capabilities that safeguard both customer and usage data to help meet data residency requirements. Customer data stays within the customer’s deployment region, unless they choose to use Snowflake’s cross-region collaboration and/or cross-region business continuity capabilities, powered by Snowgrid. Snowgrid is the technology layer that interconnects a Snowflake customer’s business ecosystem across regions and clouds to simplify global operations. Additionally, usage data is collected as part of Snowflake’s normal operations, for purposes like billing, accounting, monitoring, maintenance and service improvements. Usage data is typically aggregated across Snowflake’s worldwide commercial deployments in a global repository. To help customers fulfill data residency requirements more easily, Snowflake is introducing a foundational product innovation in select commercial deployments called a zonal repository. These select EU deployments will be connected to and will send all usage data to the EU repository and only select usage data will be sent to the global repository. 

European Union (EU) data sovereignty 

Snowflake’s first zonal repository outside of the US will be located in the EU to house usage data collected from the region. Select usage data will be sent from the zonal to the global repository. To further strengthen customers’ EU data sovereignty posture, Snowflake is also developing stricter data access controls through a regional support model. Establishing these data boundary mechanisms is vital to Snowflake’s commitment to provide trusted cloud services to European customers. 

The concepts of a zonal repository and regional support model can be extended to other sovereign regions and clouds, and Snowflake is actively exploring further expansions consistent with this approach. 

Further investments for Department of Defense (DoD) workloads

Another area that Snowflake has invested heavily in is the U.S. public sector and regulated commercial markets. Snowflake has not only achieved key certifications — including FedRAMP® High , Department of Defense Impact Level 4 (DoD IL4), StateRAMP® High, ISO 9001, Cyber Essentials Plus (CE+), Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalog (C5) and Trusted Information Security Assessment Exchange (TISAX) — but also supports regulated workloads subject to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Security Policy, Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Publication 1075, Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and Defense FAR Supplement (DFARS). In 2023, Snowflake launched the AI Data Cloud for Government & Education to provide a trusted data platform for federal, state and local governments, and educational institutions, to securely break down data silos, improve system resiliency and better serve citizens. Snowflake continues to invest in supporting some of the U.S. public sector’s most regulated workloads by now offering a separate environment in AWS (generally available soon), with a dedicated deployment for DoD customers and contractors performing contracts with or for DoD customers. This deployment includes a networking integration with the DoD’s Boundary Cloud Access Point (BCAP). With this dedicated environment, DoD mission owners and their contractors will have a secure implementation to handle Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) and to help achieve regulatory compliance.

Learn More

To learn more about how federal agencies can boost mission effectiveness with Snowflake, download this ebook.