Snowflake is pleased to announce public preview of a new feature: Database Replication. Customers using Snowflake Standard edition and above can use this feature for non business continuity and disaster recovery scenarios including: 

  • Secure data sharing across clouds and regions
  • Data portability to facilitate account migrations 

We are also announcing that Snowflake Enterprise for Sensitive Data (ESD) edition will now be called Snowflake Business Critical (BC) edition, and it includes a new feature called Database Failover and Failback, which provides business continuity. This new feature is offered at your existing cost per credit, and you are charged only if it is used.

The benefits of a multi-cloud strategy

The decision to adopt multiple public clouds is recommended for both technology and business reasons. Cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) each offer services that address different customer concerns (for example, security, the ability to migrate applications, and the level of available analytics or application development services). By adopting a multi-cloud strategy, organizations avoid vendor lock-in while harnessing best-of-breed technology for their applications, services, and solutions.

Database Replication makes global data a reality

Snowflake Database Replication provides the following benefits: 

  • Data freshness and near-zero data loss: To meet their requirements for data freshness (data sharing use case) or maximum acceptable data loss (Business Continuity Disaster Recovery use case), customers can schedule Snowflake Database Replication to run at a frequency of their choice. Replication supports incremental refreshes so only the changes that occur during the last refresh are replicated. This ensures replication operations finish in a timely manner.
  • Instant recovery during an outage: The Database Failover and Failback feature provides instantaneous failover and failback operations for immediate data recovery. Secondary databases can be used at any time for read-only workloads. If an outage is detected, customers can perform a database failover to promote secondary databases in the available region to serve as primary databases for write workloads. After the outage is resolved, customers  can then perform a database failback (a failover in the reverse direction) to resume normal business operations. 
  • Security: Data is encrypted in transit between regions and between cloud providers and it is Tri-Secret Secure compatible.

As organizations increasingly move their data to public clouds, the market is projected to reach $331.2 billion by 2021—a 54.5% increase in just two years. This rapid growth is attributed primarily to the shift from on-premises environments and private clouds to public clouds, but a noteworthy trend is the widespread adoption of a multi-cloud strategy. Organizations are increasingly shifting from working with one cloud provider to diversifying with several providers. 

With Snowflake Database Replication, companies can execute multi-cloud strategies without sacrificing access to data. To learn more about this feature, check out the solution brief here.