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Extend the power of your AppSec data with the new Snyk and Snowflake integration

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August 6, 2024

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We are thrilled to announce the new Snyk Analytics for Snowflake, allowing Snyk customers to seamlessly access and analyze Snyk’s data from their Snowflake account.

Our partnership with Snowflake combines Snyk’s powerful AppSec analytics with Snowflake’s cutting-edge data platform. By leveraging Snowflake’s secure data-sharing technology, the new integration equips you with everything needed to bubble up potential security threats and make data-driven decisions to improve your enterprise's security posture today — without the need for an extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool.  This solution enables enterprise security teams to save time and resources, reduce data movement costs, and increase productivity and visibility.  It provides the ability to:  

  • Extend your data analytics: Every enterprise has its own policy for alerting, prioritization, governance, and compliance. Explore, analyze, and tailor Snyk’s data to best meet your AppSec processes, KPIs, and desired insights.

    • A CISO wants to better understand the latency in remediating high-risk issues. The AppSec team builds an issue aging distribution chart that categorizes issues into predefined age buckets (e.g., up to 15 days, 15-30 days, etc.).

  • Complete the missing pieces: Join Snyk’s data with your own datasets based on proprietary or external data, and build a single pane of glass dashboard that is available in your enterprise BI platform.

    • An AppSec team struggles to associate remediation performance KPIs with their respective owners due to gradual changes that have occurred since they set up their org structure in Snyk. By joining Snyk’s data with their internal org dataset, they are able to correlate security issues with their current owners accurately.

  • Accelerate time to value: Getting access to Snyk’s data with Snowflake Secure Data Sharing is effortless and quick. It doesn’t involve any engineering work, and the actual setup takes minutes.

    • A data engineer is assigned the task of building a data pipeline to fetch records from API endpoints and populate them into a dedicated database. She spends several days reviewing the API documentation, setting up the pipeline, and automating the process. However, once the data pipeline was ready, the AppSec team complained about data freshness. It turned out that fetching all the data takes a few days, due to the data magnitude and the API rate limits. Snowflake Secure Data Sharing provides a seamless solution, taking only minutes to set up and deliver fresh data to the AppSec team without any additional effort.

Unleashing tailored AppSec analytics

Leveraging the Snyk integration with the Snowflake AI Data Cloud extends your flexibility, allowing you to surface insights that you care about, measure KPIs according to your own policy, and present the data in the granularity of your choice.

Here are a few examples where flexibility takes center stage:

  • Advanced issue prioritization: Build a prioritization formula based on multiple considerations (CVSS, severity, EPSS, reachability, etc.) and set weights to make sure R&D teams are working on the riskiest threats first.

  • Tailored KPIs: Calculate SLA, MTTR, or backlog compliance according to your AppSec policy. Identify and address performance gaps before they become critical, and ensure that your CISO and management team have visibility to the current status at all times.

  • Ensure the business context is there: Having AppSec metrics and measurements in place is great, but it can have a very limited impact if not displayed in the right context. Combine Snyk data with your internal databases to correlate performance and risk metrics with business units, teams, and products.

  • Serve your internal customers where enterprise data lives: AppSec teams utilize numerous tools and platforms to maintain their company's security posture. While they manage their tasks, the management team must oversee the various security fronts and ensure all aspects are handled properly. However, it's impractical for managers to access each separate security solution for a comprehensive status overview. This often results in various data processing methods, programmatic or even manual, that eventually result in executive reports. By using Snyk Analytics for Snowflake, the issue of dispersed data is resolved, allowing AppSec data to be centralized on a single platform, which is linked to the organization's BI platform (Tableau, Looker, Power BI, etc.). This allows key stakeholders to access the data in the BI platform directly, where they already consume all other reports.

Optimize engineering resources and cut operational costs

Consuming and processing external data sources is a challenging and cost-intensive task that involves multiple stages such as data mapping, assembling ETL flows, handling errors, scheduling automation, monitoring, and maintenance. This process requires more attention and resources as new datasets become available.

However, this complex process becomes effortless with the Snyk Analytics for Snowflake. Instead of going through these steps and building your own data pipelines, Snowflake handles it for you. As a Snowflake admin, you simply accept the data share, create a database, and grant user access. Within minutes, the Snyk database becomes accessible in your Snowflake account, allowing you to utilize Snowflake’s rich ecosystem and bubble up the data to the BI platform of your choice.

There are no rate limits, and you don't need to worry about refreshing the data or monitoring the process. Additionally, when Snyk releases new datasets, they are available for you automatically, requiring no extra work on your part.

Early adopters offer positive reviews 

The Snyk product security team is the first adopter of Snyk and Snowflake data share solution, adopting it internally in mid-2023. Once our own ProdSec team confirmed that the provided data meets their AppSec reporting needs, including scope, freshness, and quality, we knew we were ready to launch a beta program.

The beta program allowed nearly a dozen customers to tap into Snyk data through Snowflake Data Sharing and proceed by creating custom dashboards in their own BI platforms. After talking with each customer and gathering feedback, we came up with the following common points that echoed the most across the beta users: 

  • The integration was a seamless experience

  • It works great and has all the information that I expected to have

  • It’s easy to enrich the data with other sources, allowing more granular filtering and aggregations

  • We were able to create dashboards for our day-to-day operation, as well as provide the management team with a more high-level overview

  • Compared to working with the API, the data is fresher, and we don’t need to worry about rate limits

Snyk Analytics for Snowflake is now available for early access! 

Be sure to check out our new Snyk Learn Course and Snyk documentation to learn more. Contact your Snyk account team to get started today.

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