Today’s governmental and educational organizations can’t fully use the wealth of data they possess to improve citizen and student outcomes. Government agencies often deal with disparate and siloed data that can impact real-time decision-making. Securely exchanging information and collaborating on data remains an essential task in almost every agency strategy. But with legacy business processes and architectures, agencies often make risk-averse decisions and have to rely on costly approaches that require physically moving stale data.
Educational institutions also struggle to unify institutional data—such as institutional research, student retention, human resources, finance, and student services—as they try to manage data demands with limited IT resources.
These challenges come at a time when governments across the globe, including in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the U.K., are mandating digital transformation efforts and more data sharing, or information sharing, between the public and private sectors.
Data-driven missions for the public sector
Every day, nearly 800 million people across the world wake up and go off to serve, protect, or educate within the public sector. At Snowflake, we take enormous pride in helping our public sector customers fulfill their missions. That’s why Snowflake launched the Government & Education Data Cloud, a global network designed to help public sector organizations unlock the value of their critical data and collaborate with partners, policymakers, and stakeholders in a secure and scalable way.
The Government & Education Data Cloud is part of the Snowflake platform, which offers a single, fully managed, multi-cloud platform for data consolidation, governance, and performance. It empowers decision-makers in government and education to share and collaborate with data within and across agencies and departments. This data sharing and collaboration provides public sector leaders with holistic views of citizens, patients, and students, and helps prevent and protect against fraud, waste, and abuse.
With the Government & Education Data Cloud, public sector organizations are leveraging data to drive meaningful change. The following public sector customers are using Snowflake to reduce local homelessness, increase student graduation and retention rates, boost patient outcomes through research collaboration, improve disaster recovery efforts, and achieve decision dominance:
6 key capabilities of the Government & Education Data Cloud
Snowflake’s Government & Education Data Cloud provides public sector organizations with six key capabilities for achieving mission success:
1. Intra- and cross-agency data sharing and collaboration
The Snowflake Government & Education Data Cloud offers a single, integrated, and cross-cloud data platform that eliminates technical and institutional data silos and ensures high levels of data security and governance in accordance with U.S. federal and state government authorizations. It also offers support for regulated customer workloads so public sector organizations and educational institutions can securely share data across teams, between agencies, and externally with the public or the private sector.
Snowflake customers Orange County (OC) Courts are on a journey to modernize their systems and drive operational efficiencies through data. Previously, they had multiple systems, ranging from on-premises to hybrid cloud and cloud-only solutions. As a result, data was siloed and teams were limited to pulling and managing data through Excel. After adopting the Snowflake Data Cloud, they built the blueprint for the Judicial Council of California to leverage data as a whole using Snowflake’s secure data sharing, which allows them to better serve their constituents.
2. Establishing 360-degree views of stakeholders
Governments and education institutions can combine data sources to create holistic 360-degree views of entities, citizens, recipients, and students to better understand and improve their services. Snowflake customer Auburn University built “One Auburn” on Snowflake’s Data Cloud. One Auburn is part of the university’s strategic plan to centralize stakeholder data for better data-driven decision-making and to deliver personalized experiences to university stakeholders. Snowflake has become the single source of truth for Auburn’s data on finance, athletics, alumni, human resources, students, faculty, and more.
3. Monitoring for fraud, waste, and abuse
Snowflake also helps public sector organizations detect and prevent fraud sooner by addressing their technology and data limitations. The Snowflake Data Cloud allows development of a single source of truth and advanced analytics capabilities to track and respond to improper payments quickly. Agencies can securely deploy AI and fraud detection using all kinds of data—including public, proprietary, and agency data—to flag claims and applications immediately. AI and machine learning can also help reduce waste wherever payments occur. And governed, real-time data sharing reduces unnecessary data exports while delivering data for analysis and risk scoring. Snowflake’s powerful platform facilitates the performance, scale, elasticity, and security required to process enormous volumes of data and perform advanced analytics.
4. An industry-leading network of public sector partners
Snowflake customers can take advantage of a rich partner ecosystem and its industry-specific, prebuilt templates for faster, more valuable solutions. Snowflake’s Government & Education Data Cloud launch partners have built a diverse set of industry solutions and curated data sets to help public sector organizations achieve their mission faster and better serve stakeholders. Our partners include:
- Technology partners such Amazon Web Services, IBM, IMMUTA, and Collibra
- Solution providers such as Billigence, Booz Allen Hamilton, CGI, Cognosante, Deloitte, General Dynamics Information Technology, KPMG, ICF, Plante Moran, and SMX
- Marketplace data providers such as CARTO, Cybersyn, Element Data, Factset, GovSpend, Knoema, Morning Consult, S&P Global, Vantage Point Consulting, and Yes Energy
- Powered By Snowflake partners including Cloudian, Merit, and PowerSchool
The challenge of disparate and siloed data extends across the public sector, including to federal agencies. Federal agencies require secure and efficient ways to access, centralize, share, and analyze data to deliver mission outcomes ranging from discovering groundbreaking medical insights, to delivering vital services, to supporting soldiers on the digital battlefield. That’s why Snowflake is working with partners like Booz Allen Hamilton to bring the Snowflake Data Cloud to the federal market to advance federal government missions.
“Booz Allen is proud to be partnering with Snowflake to drive a new paradigm for inter-governmental and cross-agency data sharing,” said Dan Tucker, Senior Vice President at Booz Allen Hamilton. “Snowflake’s innovative data cloud technology, combined with Booz Allen’s mission expertise, is helping federal agencies unlock previously siloed data sets and generate new insights which advance critical mission outcomes.” This partnership enables federal agencies to share secure and accurate data to drive better decision making.
5. New feature parity for government customers
Snowflake’s Government & Education Data Cloud launch announces greater feature parity for government customers using Snowflake. Government customers now have the ability to securely and easily share and collaborate with data. Government customers using Snowflake can leverage Snowflake Marketplace to discover and access new data sets of interest and to publish their own private or public listings for better data collaboration with other agencies and contractors. With this feature parity, government customers will be able to share listings to target other government accounts and public multi-tenant accounts across any cloud or region.
6. Snowflake’s commitment to compliance
Snowflake is dedicated to serving the public sector. We are continuously expanding our portfolio of security and compliance certifications in cooperation with our customers. To help U.S. federal, state, and local agencies meet security and compliance standards, Snowflake’s platform has achieved FedRAMP Moderate, StateRAMP High, and Department of Defense (DoD) Impact Level 2 (IL2) authorization, and supports regulated workloads subject to International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS), Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 1075, Family Education and Privacy Act (FERPA), and Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and Defense FAR Supplement (DFARS) safeguarding requirements across certain of its U.S. government-designated and commercial regions. Snowflake is also “In Process” for FedRAMP High in its AWS GovCloud (US) West region, and anticipates DoD Impact Level 4 (IL4) authorization later this year.
We are also at the forefront of addressing the outcomes outlined in the latest U.S. National Cybersecurity Strategy. In fact, we built our infrastructure and product based on the core pillars of security, compliance, and democratizing cybersecurity, and we remain committed to the stewardship of customer data and the secure sharing of data. These cumulative achievements and ongoing efforts solidify Snowflake’s status as a trusted data platform used by governments throughout the United States to securely guard sensitive data against potential threats.
Ready to learn more?
To learn more about how Snowflake’s Government & Education Data Cloud can help you deliver data-driven decision-making, visit Snowflake for Public Sector. More information on our Government & Education Data Cloud launch partner solutions is available here. Also, be sure to join us at Snowflake Summit to learn from public sector leaders and Snowflake experts about the human impact in the Data Cloud.