Snowflake Launches Government & Education Data Cloud

  • By Kate Lucariello
  • 06/12/23

Data cloud company Snowflake has launched the Government & Education Data Cloud, a platform with specific, pre-built capabilities that give the public sector and education partners a single integrated cross-cloud data platform for multiple uses. This platform will meet international, federal, state, and local agency security and compliance standards, according to a release.

These standards include FedRAMP Moderate and StateRAMP High, support for regulated workloads subject to International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS), Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 1075, and Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and Defense FAR Supplement (DFARS). Snowflake is also in process for FedRAMP High in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud (US West) Region. It also supports Family Education and Privacy Act (FERPA) workloads.

These standards address risks related to agencies having to share data by physically moving it. Educational institutions are also challenged by limited IT resources in unifying all their data related to research, student services and human resource records, and finance.

“These challenges come at a time when the White House is encouraging digital transformation efforts and more data sharing between the public and private sectors,” the release notes.

The Snowflake Government & Education Data Cloud is designed to:

  • Enable intra- and cross agency data, sharing, and collaboration;

  • Allow government and education institutions to combine data sources to create 360° views to improve services for recipients and students;

  • Prevent fraud and abuse by addressing technology and data restrictions;

  • Use partner industry-specific pre-built templates to provide needed solutions more quickly.

This new resource is expected to give government customers the same benefits the private sector enjoys of sharing data within government agencies, getting listings from Snowflake marketplace providers, and privately sharing data elsewhere.

Snowflake is currently taking signups from government customers, and data sharing for them will be available later in summer 2023, according to the release.

“The Snowflake Government & Education Data Cloud will help government agencies and educational institutions accelerate their modernization efforts by making data more readily available on a cross-cloud data platform that meets the highest levels of data security and governance,” said Jeff Frazier, global head of Public Sector at Snowflake.

"Snowflake’s Government & Education Data Cloud has enabled New York University to centralize our data across various Learning Management Systems into a predominantly self-service data platform," said Satya Kunta, chief data architect and senior director at New York University. "With Snowflake, we have seamlessly transitioned to utilizing real-time data, enabling simplified access to student engagement metrics for efficient identification of necessary student interventions."

Visit Snowflake’s Public Sector blog page to learn more about the Government & Education Data Cloud.

About the Author

Kate Lucariello is a former newspaper editor, EAST Lab high school teacher and college English teacher.

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