Businesses don’t operate in a vacuum, no matter what size they are. The interdependent relationship between suppliers, partners, vendors, employees and customers requires compliant and secure data sharing, which is a growing consideration for enterprise growth.
“Firms use data as a productive asset to understand customers, target products and drive demand. But data isn’t isolated within each firm; it’s part of a broader data-sharing network. One company’s data can help another make better decisions,” Huan Tang, assistant professor of finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, says in an interview with the school’s business journal.
Consider, then, a space where companies could share data in a way that prioritizes regulatory and industry standards while enabling streamlined collaboration. That’s where a data clean room can come into play. Snowflake defines a data clean room as “a secure and controlled environment that allows multiple companies, or divisions of a company, to bring data together for joint analysis. Internal clean room guidelines can be established to keep data handling and sharing aligned with core privacy regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA and the CCPA. In the data clean room, personally identifiable information (PII) can be anonymized.”
Snowflake Data Clean Rooms General Manager Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan says data clean rooms can support modern enterprises, a learning threshold for adoption and use cases that can add value to businesses.
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What Should Businesses Know About Data Clean Rooms?
“There is always a need to share data securely, and there is usually a need to protect that data because it is proprietary,” Sivaramakrishnan says. “When you think about a business and the types of data that it must touch, there’s a full spectrum between regulatory compliance and business confidentiality that basically governs how data should be shared. Having an application or a tool by which you can share this data with the ecosystem that you work with as an enterprise is where a data clean room comes in.”
Today’s collaboration platforms allow for more structure and visibility, with governance rules and access controls that are in line with regulatory frameworks. This means that environments such as data clean rooms are ideal for industries such as financial services, logistics, healthcare and the public sector.
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A ‘Learning Threshold’ for Adoption
Some forms of collaboration are well served through email and other digital workspace platforms. But what happens when you need to share a high volume of enterprise data?
A business may have to run large-volume analytical workloads, and there may be questions about security posture; governance posture; and the rules under which certain data assets are accessible and by whom, when and where, Sivaramakrishnan adds. These questions set up what she calls a “learning threshold” rather than an obstacle for the adoption of data clean rooms.
To address these questions, businesses need team members who are data-savvy. Adopting a data clean room is more complex than just spinning up a certain channel on a widely used workplace collaboration platform.
“There’s a certain learning curve that goes into making sure that you understand what you’re doing with the data sets you’re making available in a clean room,” Sivaramakrishnan says.
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Let’s say a brand advertiser approaches a media company and wants to know the reach of a campaign on a particular segment of programming on the company’s platform. That can involve many data sets, such as audience information and customer acquisition costs.
“These are pieces that need to be set up in a particular use case that is deployed in a clean room. The underlying data sets have to be locked and protected. There are policies under which that is set up. The use of data clean rooms is a nuanced one,” she adds.
Adding Value to a Business
Sivaramakrishnan notes the potential of data clean rooms in other industries. In healthcare, such an environment could be used by an organization looking to recruit certain patients for a clinical trial. In the finance sector, data clean rooms can be used in fraud detection and dynamic credit scoring models.
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“All of these things are about multiple data sources sharing data about a consumer, about the user, about the propensity for a consumer to be interested in a particular product or a service. This is all about data sharing,” she says.
There is also a use case for data clean rooms in securing a large venue, such as a sports arena. The layout of a large physical location, the infrastructure and the security protocols are proprietary information that a venue may want to share with different teams and vendors.
“Customers educate us on newer scenarios where this is possible, where we may not have thought of a data sharing or a collaboration use case. Our customers help us constantly explore new use cases every day,” Sivaramakrishnan says.
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The Future of Collaboration
When enterprises are choosing tools for collaboration, it is critical to work with platforms that are cloud-agnostic. Not all enterprises are built on a single cloud.
“Your partners and customers may not be on the same cloud, and you still want all of the functionality of collaboration to be highly compliant and highly secure and easy to use. Choose a clean room solution that is cross-cloud,” Sivaramakrishnan says. “Also, choose a solution that makes it easy to adopt, because it is somewhat of a technical tool, and yet there are very few solutions on the market that make it easy for a large enterprise to use.”
