Optimize Storage Costs and Simplify Compliance with Storage Lifecycle Policies, Now Generally Available
Every organization today faces the same fundamental challenge: how to balance the need to retain vast amounts of data with the growing pressure to control costs. A financial services firm may need to keep years of model outputs for regulatory audits. A media company might accumulate terabytes of log data that’s rarely touched but must be preserved. Security teams across industries generate endless logs that are essential to keep but seldom accessed. Whether it’s compliance, analytics or operational traceability, the story is the same — data that was once critical for daily operations eventually becomes cold, yet remains too valuable or mandated to delete outright.
At Snowflake, we believe in making the complex simple. To address these challenges, we are excited to announce the general availability of Storage Lifecycle Policies. This feature provides a simple, automated way to manage your data lifecycle, helping you dramatically reduce storage costs (by 55%-90%) for dormant data and streamline compliance with minimal operational overhead.
In this blog post, we will show how you can use Storage Lifecycle Policies to automatically manage your data lifecycle — from archiving cold data to deleting expired records — so you can save costs, maintain compliance and focus on innovation instead of infrastructure.
What is a Storage Lifecycle Policy?
A Storage Lifecycle Policy is a schema-level object that lets you automatically archive or delete data from standard Snowflake tables. These policies are applied at a row level, providing fine-grained control over which specific data is archived or deleted based on a defined timeline. You define a simple policy expression, and Snowflake takes care of the rest, automatically running the policy every day on shared compute resources.
Getting started involves just two steps, with a new set of privileges enabling you to control who manages and applies these policies:
Create a policy that specifies which rows to archive or delete.
Apply the policy to one or more tables.
Here’s a quick example:
Step 1: Create the policy
Create a storage lifecycle policy that archives data older than 360 days into the COLD tier for five years before deletion.
Step 2: Apply the policy
Attach the policy to a table (my_table).
Key benefits
"At Block's scale, managing petabytes of security logs for compliance isn't just an operational challenge; it's a technology problem that requires innovation,” says Bryan Cha, Staff Platform Security Engineer at Block. “We needed a more efficient way to meet our seven-year retention requirements without compromising our ability to protect our customers. When we shared this challenge with Snowflake, they saw the broader opportunity and built Storage Lifecycle Policies. We worked together throughout development, testing the feature against our production environment and sharing insights that helped shape the final design. The result is a solution that strengthens our security posture while demonstrating what's possible when you approach infrastructure challenges with a technology-first mindset."
Dramatically reduce storage costs
Storage Lifecycle Policies help you optimize costs by automatically moving older, infrequently accessed data to cheaper archival tiers. For data retained for over a year with periodic retrieval (for example, 10% every six months), you can save 67%-77% on your storage and management costs using the COOL tier. Using the COLD tier, the savings can reach 90%.
Streamline regulatory compliance
Automate data retention and deletion to effortlessly address compliance requirements. You can configure policies to archive data for a specified period before permanent deletion, or simply expire and delete it without archival, helping you adhere to your organization's data governance standards.
Eliminate operational complexity
Snowflake fully automates the data lifecycle process, freeing your team from managing complex manual scripts. This reduces operational burden and allows you to focus on deriving value from your data. You can easily monitor policy executions through the STORAGE_LIFECYCLE_POLICY_HISTORY table function to maintain full visibility.
On-demand retrieval from archive
You can selectively retrieve a copy of archived data into a new table using a simple command with a WHERE clause, giving you the same fine-grained control for retrieval as you have for archival.
Get started today
Storage Lifecycle Policies are now generally available to all customers. The archival tiers (COOL and COLD) are available in all commercial AWS regions, and expiration policies are supported in all regions and clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP). Archival tier in Azure is currently available in preview. Start simplifying your data management, reducing storage costs and moving towards your compliance goals today. To learn more, read the Snowflake documentation.
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