Snowflake Data Governance

Snowflake Data Governance refers to the built-in capabilities Snowflake provides to know, protect and control data stored in the platform. These features sit under the Snowflake Horizon umbrella and are applied directly where the data lives, so governance rules follow the data across users, tools and shared accounts.

Governance starts with discovery and classification: Snowflake can automatically detect and tag sensitive data such as personal information, and object tags let teams label tables and columns by sensitivity, owner or business domain. Access is then controlled through role-based access control, dynamic data masking, tag-based masking, row access policies, aggregation and projection policies. Access History and Object Dependencies show who touched which data and how it flows downstream, supporting audits and impact analysis, while data quality monitoring and lineage views help teams trust the data they use.

Organizations rely on these features to meet privacy rules such as GDPR, HIPAA and CCPA, safely share data internally and externally, and give data stewards central control without copying data into separate governance tools.