Snowflake Data Clean Rooms: Securely Collaborate to Unlock Insights and Value
In December 2023, Snowflake announced its acquisition of data clean room technology provider Samooha. Samooha’s intuitive UI and focus on reducing the complexity of sharing data led to it being named one of the most innovative data science companies of 2024 by Fast Company. Now, Samooha’s offering is integrated into Snowflake and launched as Snowflake Data Clean Rooms, a Snowflake Native App on Snowflake Marketplace, generally available to customers in AWS East, AWS West and Azure West. Snowflake Data Clean Rooms make it easy to build and use data clean rooms in Snowflake, with no additional access fees set by Snowflake.
What is a data clean room?
Data clean rooms provide a controlled environment that allows multiple companies, or divisions of a company, to securely collaborate on sensitive or regulated data while fully preserving the privacy of the enterprise data. Enterprises should not have to make challenging trade-offs between following compliance regulations and making sensitive data available for collaboration. With data clean rooms, organizations have an opportunity to unlock the value of sensitive data by allowing for joint data analytics, machine learning and AI by anonymizing, processing and storing personally identifiable information (PII) in a compliant way.
How does a data clean room work?
Data clean rooms can be used to control the following:
- What data comes into the clean room
- How the data in the clean room can be joined to other data in the clean room
- What types of analytics each party can perform on the data
- What data, if any, can leave the clean room
Any sensitive or regulated data, such as PII, that is loaded into the clean room is encrypted. The clean room provider has full control over the clean room environment, while approved partners can get a feed with anonymized data.
Why Snowflake Data Clean Rooms?
Until now, data clean room technology was generally deployed by large organizations with access to technical data privacy experts. Snowflake Data Clean Rooms remove the technical and financial barriers, allowing companies of all sizes to easily build, use and benefit from data clean rooms.
Unlock value with data clean rooms easily and at no additional license cost
Teams can stand up new data clean rooms quickly, easily and at no additional license fees through an app that is available on Snowflake Marketplace. Built for business and technical users alike, Snowflake Data Clean Rooms allow organizations to unlock value from data faster with industry-specific workflows and templates such as audience overlap, reach and frequency, last touch attribution and more.
Tap into the open and interoperable ecosystem of the Snowflake Data Cloud
The Snowflake Data Cloud provides an open, neutral and interoperable data clean room ecosystem that allows organizations to collaborate with all their partners seamlessly, regardless of whether they have their own Snowflake accounts. Companies can also leverage turnkey third-party integrations and solutions for data enrichment, identity, activation and more across providers.
Snowflake Data Clean Rooms allows you to collaborate with your partners seamlessly across regions and clouds thanks to Cross-Cloud Snowgrid (Snowflake Data Clean Rooms is currently available in AWS East/West and Azure West). It provides a cross-cloud technology layer that allows you to interconnect your business’ ecosystems across regions and clouds and operate at scale.
Take advantage of Snowflake’s built-in privacy and governance features
Unlock privacy-enhanced collaboration on your sensitive data through an app built on the Snowflake Native App Framework. By bringing the clean room solution to your data, Snowflake Data Clean Rooms removes the need for data to ever leave the governance, security and privacy parameters of Snowflake.
By leveraging Snowpark for AI/ML, cryptographic compute support, differential privacy models, security attestation guarantees and more, Snowflake Data Clean Rooms helps companies maintain privacy while allowing for deeper analytical insight with business partners. You can easily integrate data and activation partners to realize use cases in marketing, advertising, and across other industries.
Data clean room use cases across industries
Key use cases for data clean rooms are found in marketing, media and advertising. However, organizations across industries are realizing value with data clean rooms, including financial services and healthcare and life sciences.
Attribution for advertising and marketing
One popular use case for data clean rooms is to link anonymized marketing and advertising data from multiple parties for attribution. Suppose a company has its own first-party data containing attributes about its customers and their associated sales SKUs. In that case, the company can use a data clean room to improve audience insights for advertising. Let’s say the company wants to find new customers with the same attributes as its best customers, and combine those attributes with other characteristics to drive upsell opportunities.
To create the target segments and comply with privacy requirements, the company uploads its data into a clean room that it creates or is shared by its ad partner. Participants can securely join any first-party data without exposing IDs. Without a data clean room, only limited amounts of data could flow between the various parties due to data privacy, regulations and competitive concerns.
Measurement for advertising and marketing
Another key data clean room use case is the measurement of the effectiveness of advertising and marketing campaigns. Advertisers want to understand who saw an advertisement, for example, as well as who engaged with it. This information will be distributed across the different media partners it takes to serve an ad to a consumer. Creating a joint analysis across the data of these different media partners is important for advertisers to understand campaign results and to optimize future campaigns. Such measurement can only be realized through a data clean room as it protects the sensitivity of the consumer data across all parties while surfacing valuable analytical insights.
Monetizing proprietary data
The omnichannel customer journey is complex, and it rarely starts with a brand’s advertisement. For example, if a consumer is planning an upcoming purchase of a kitchen appliance, the journey is likely to start with online review sites. A reviews site collects top-of-funnel data that would be invaluable to the appliance brand. With a data clean room, the reviews website could create a compliant third-party data product, manage access to it through the clean room, and monetize it.
Consumer goods-retail collaboration
Data clean rooms allow retailers and consumer goods companies to collaborate with brands that advertise with them. For example, a retailer can share transaction data in a privacy- and governance-friendly manner to provide insights into conversion signals and enable better targeting, personalization and attribution.
Enhancing financial service customer data
Similar to use cases in marketing, data clean rooms enable financial institutions to securely collaborate across a variety of use cases like credit fraud modeling and money laundering. Sensitive financial consumer data can be enhanced with second and third-party data sources and analyzed across institutional boundaries to detect anomalous patterns and behaviors, all while protecting consumer data privacy.
Enriching patient health data
In healthcare and life sciences, a hospital can use data clean rooms to share regulated patient data with a pharmaceutical company. The company can enrich and analyze the data to identify patterns in patient outcomes across clinical trials. The data clean room environment enables the patient data to remain private while still contributing to meaningful insights.
Learn more about Snowflake Data Clean Rooms
Get started today with Snowflake Data Clean Rooms: visit the listing on Snowflake Marketplace and the Snowflake documentation page for additional details. To see a demo of Snowflake Data Clean Rooms, register for Snowflake’s virtual Accelerate Advertising, Media, & Entertainment event and learn how media and advertising organizations collaborate in the Media Data Cloud to enhance business growth and data monetization, develop new products, and harness the power of AI and ML.