Snowflake’s Data Classification Lets You Identify and Tag Sensitive Data Directly in Snowsight

At Snowflake, we believe in empowering our customers to harness the full potential of their data while maintaining robust compliance standards and safeguarding data privacy. We recognize the critical importance of quickly identifying and safeguarding sensitive data objects, and we consistently strive to provide solutions that help achieve these goals — from advancements such as classification and tag-based policies to the intuitive Data Governance UI. 

Today we're thrilled to announce another exciting addition to our suite of offerings: Snowflake Data Classification, a native user experience to run and review data classification within Snowsight (now in public preview). This simple experience lets you start a data classification job for an entire schema or a subset of tables within it, allowing you to choose when you want to review and apply the classification results; or automate the tag application via auto-tagging. You can then protect the data with a row access policy, masking policy or both.

Data Classification in Snowsight marks a significant leap forward in enabling our users to identify and tag sensitive data effortlessly through a UI. With just a few clicks in Snowsight, customers can now classify data, streamlining the process of discovering and labeling sensitive information within their data sets.

Snowflake’s Data Classification functionality is designed to equip organizations with a deep understanding of their data assets. By efficiently identifying and tagging sensitive information, teams can understand, protect and unlock data to accelerate their data analysis processes while maintaining adherence to compliance regulations and data protection protocols.

You can now go to any schema and choose to run classification for all tables within that schema, or some of the tables within the schema. The capability allows you to run classification at scale, rather than having to run and review results at a table-by-table level, and in a much more intuitive user experience than parsing the results via JSON.

The image below illustrates how you can choose a schema of choice and run classification with one click. 

Notice that you have the option to run classification with auto-tagging. The feature allows you to “auto-apply” high-confidence Snowflake classifiers to objects without having to navigate the objects one by one and manually apply the classification tag. 

You can then review the automatically applied tags by clicking on “View Results.” If you decide not to go with the auto-tagging option, you can click on “Classification Results” to review the suggested semantic and privacy category tags for the objects. The recommended result appears blank if there is no change in the category. The images below illustrate how classification results will appear.

Data Classification within Snowsight offers  a user-friendly and intuitive interface to help you effectively identify and tag sensitive data. Visit the documentation page for Data Classification to get started today!