Sharing data with another account while keeping it protected

Snowflake enables secure data collaboration through the Snowflake Marketplace and Secure Data Sharing, allowing organizations to share live data without copying or moving it between accounts. Data protection features like row access policies, dynamic data masking, and object tagging help govern who can see what data, while maintaining a single source of truth. These capabilities work together to support governed collaboration both within and across organizational boundaries.

1 · Learn the must-know

• 1Secure Data Sharing lets providers share database objects (tables, views, secure UDFs) with consumers via shares, without physically copying data, so consumers always see live, up-to-date data.
• 2Data shared via Secure Data Sharing does not count against the consumer's storage costs, but consumers do pay for the compute (virtual warehouses) they use to query shared data.
• 3The Snowflake Marketplace allows providers to publish listings (free or paid) that any Snowflake account can discover and access, extending sharing beyond direct account-to-account relationships.
• 4Reader accounts allow a data provider to share data with consumers who do not have their own Snowflake account, with the provider typically bearing the compute costs.
• 5Row access policies and dynamic data masking are applied at the schema/object level and are enforced consistently even when the underlying data is shared, ensuring consistent protection across direct queries and shares.
• 6Object tagging combined with masking policies enables tag-based centralized governance, letting administrators apply a masking policy to a tag once and have it automatically enforce on all columns/objects carrying that tag, including in shared contexts.

2 · Check your understanding