Dive Brief:
- Snowflake unveiled its Government & Education Data Cloud Tuesday, an industry-tailored product suite for educational institutions and federal, state and local public sector agencies.
- The industry cloud solution meets critical compliance standards for data security and governance, such as FedRAMP and StateRAMP, according to the company. It also supports workloads subject to Internal Revenue Service 1075, international arms trafficking, criminal justice information service and other regulations, the announcement said.
- Snowflake is currently accepting sign-ups from potential government customers, who will have access to data sharing features later this summer, the announcement said.
Dive Insight:
Different industries pose distinct challenges to cloud adoption. In the public sector, security and regulatory compliance represent a major hurdle.
As in healthcare, insurance and financial services, rigid rules constrain access to sensitive data across government agencies and educational institutions.
Snowflake’s new solution is designed to remove roadblocks to modernization by easing cross-cloud data sharing within and between agencies without compromising security and governance imperatives, Jeff Frazier, global head of public sector at Snowflake, said in the announcement.
Use cases include coordinating hurricane relief efforts, intervening when students are struggling and improving public health programs, said Frazier.
Snowflake is feeling the downstream impact of a cloud optimization trend, which has flattened and slowed year-over-year revenue growth among the hyperscalers.
Attracting public sector customers is part of Snowflake’s broader strategy to expand its customer base. In April, the company added a manufacturing industry solution to a product portfolio that includes data clouds for financial services, healthcare, retail, telecom and media and advertising.
The company is banking on generative AI to accelerate cloud data usage and industry verticals to expand its customer base in the coming months, Snowflake chairman and CEO Frank Slootman, said during a recent earnings call.
“The Snowflake mission is to steadily demolish any and all limits to data, users, workloads, applications and new forms of intelligence,” said Slootman.
Microsoft, too, has ramped up its efforts to deploy a data sovereignty cloud solution for governments and public sector agencies, the tech company announced last month.
