Modernizing Regulated Workloads with Snowflake Backups

Customers in highly regulated industries have told us the same story for years: Their data lives in two worlds.

On one side are legacy systems that satisfy strict recordkeeping rules but are hard to scale and integrate. On the other side are modern cloud platforms that power analytics and AI but require complex, stitched-together solutions to achieve true immutability and ransomware resilience.

With Snowflake Backups, now generally available, customers no longer have to choose. They can keep critical data in Snowflake for up to 10 years in an immutable format designed to support demanding regulatory and security requirements — and still benefit from the ease of use of the Snowflake AI Data Cloud.

Why immutable backups matter

Regulations such as SEC 17a-4(f), SEC 18a-6(e), FINRA Rule 4511(c) and CFTC Rule 1.31(c)-(d) require records to be preserved in a non-rewritable, non-erasable way for long periods. At the same time, ransomware and insider threats have raised the bar for backup and recovery: If an attacker can delete or shorten your backups, they’re not really a last line of defense.

Customers asked us for a single capability that would:

• Support immutability and long-term retention in compliance with applicable regulations
  

• Provide stronger control against ransomware and destructive actions
  

• Deliver a fully managed experience where, once configured, Snowflake, not the customer, handles the heavy lifting
  

Snowflake Backups is designed to address those needs and has been assessed by Cohasset Associates to enable customer compliance with such regulations.

What is Snowflake Backups?

Snowflake Backups provides native, zero-copy snapshots of databases, schemas and tables in Snowflake, protected by Write Once, Read Many (WORM) semantics. Highlights include:

• Zero-copy and storage efficiency: Snowflake Backups leverages Snowflake’s zero-copy architecture to store data incrementally. Because customers pay only for the differential changes rather than full copies, they can comply with regulatory retention requirements at a fraction of the storage cost of traditional or homegrown backup strategies.
  

• Policy-driven, long-term retention: Policies define how often backups are taken and how long they’re kept — up to 10 years. Policies can be applied across many objects for consistent behavior.
  

• Retention lock and legal holds: With retention lock, backups cannot be modified or deleted or have their retention shortened for the duration of the lock, even by highly privileged roles such as ORGADMIN or ACCOUNTADMIN. Legal holds allow specific backups to be preserved beyond normal expiration for investigations or litigation.
  

• Cohasset assessment for key regulations: Snowflake has undergone a Cohasset assessment for immutable backups to support customers in addressing the electronic recordkeeping requirements such as the SEC, FINRA and CFTC rules listed previously when configured appropriately.

Once a user defines the policy for how often backups are taken and how long each one is valid, Snowflake manages the rest. It automatically creates the backups based on the specified schedule and expires them at the end of the retention period, with no extra storage accounts, lifecycle rules or custom scripts for customers to operate.

Modernizing regulated workloads onto a single platform

For many organizations, the lack of compliant immutability has forced them to keep “system of record” data on legacy platforms and only replicate subsets into Snowflake for analytics.

Snowflake Backups helps remove that barrier, allowing customers to:

• Treat Snowflake as a system of record for regulated data
• Keep that data in the same platform where analytics and AI run
• Simplify architectures by reducing dependence on stand-alone archival systems

Easy to adopt

We designed Snowflake Backups to be simple to set up and use in just a few steps:

1. Create backup policies that capture frequency and retention (up to 10 years), as well as retention lock requirements.

2. Apply those policies to databases, schemas or tables that hold regulated or mission-critical data.
   

3. Optionally, add legal holds to specific backups involved in investigations or audits.
   

4. When needed, restore from a backup using straightforward SQL, without having to orchestrate external storage or custom jobs.
   

Once configured, Snowflake manages the backup lifecycle, enforcement of retention and lock, and the underlying storage details.

What’s at stake if you don’t use immutable Snowflake Backups?

Customers can continue relying on traditional replication and backup methods, but choosing not to adopt immutable Snowflake Backups can mean:

• Ongoing challenges in meeting regulatory requirements, with a continued need for separate archival systems to meet WORM-style requirements
  

• Greater exposure to ransomware and privileged threats, where conventional backups might be altered or deleted if credentials are compromised
  

• Operational overhead from maintaining homegrown backup stacks and cloud storage policies
  

• Slower modernization, as regulated “system of record” workloads remain tied to legacy platforms
  

Snowflake Backups is designed to offer a simpler path: a native, fully managed capability that helps address these risks while enabling more regulated workloads to move onto Snowflake.

To learn more and get started with Snowflake Backups, contact your Snowflake team or check out our user guide.