Alation, the data intelligence company, is announcing that it has expanded its partnership with Snowflake, enabling Alation’s Open Data Quality Framework to now support integration with Snowflake Horizon. This integration aims to empower enterprises to surface and remediate data quality issues before they impact downstream business and data operations, driving better governance, faster, more accurate AI model development, and more trusted decision making, according to Alation.
Data quality continues to grow in proprietary relevance, especially as generative AI (GenAI) maintains its importance to businesses in nearly every industry. Crucial to successful GenAI implementation is data quality, as GenAI’s rapid, complex data processing at scale places a heavy burden on data governance. An overall lack of AI readiness—compounded with the presence of fragmented legacy systems—means that for enterprises to realize GenAI success, they must establish a robust data governance foundation.
Addressing these challenges, the combined strengths of Alation and Snowflake deliver a unified, trusted view of data quality issues across an enterprise’s data landscape to modernize legacy data infrastructure, accelerate AI initiatives, and mitigate risks, according to the companies.
“We are revolutionizing data quality and the approach to AI readiness through our strengthened integration with Snowflake,” said David Chao, CMO and head of technology alliances at Alation. “Poor data quality is a major obstacle in data and GenAI initiatives. With Alation and Snowflake, organizations can confidently leverage their data for crucial decisions and AI strategies, promoting a data-driven culture throughout their data estate.”
Alation and Snowflake’s integrated solution offers an open, extensible approach to critical data quality metrics—such as freshness, accuracy, uniqueness, and completeness—allowing every user to surface and leverage trusted data while governing both models and datasets within Snowflake’s extensive AI Data Cloud.
“Data trust is now critical in every business sector as teams face heightened scrutiny over data quality and its impact on AI applications and analytics," said Sujay Mimani, IT architecture senior manager at AMD. "Alation's straightforward search and discovery capabilities, federated governance, and the ease to integrate Data Quality platforms enable users to independently access and trust data, helping ensure reliable, compliant, and suitable information. This reassures data, AI/ML teams, and decision-makers of the data’s integrity, making data a valuable asset for confident, strategic decision making."
Additionally, Alation improves data quality with the following capabilities:
- Proactive data quality monitoring with the ability to curate and act on data quality metrics from Snowflake—including customized data metric functions (DMFs)—directly into the Alation Data Intelligence Platform
- Streamlined data discovery via Alation’s intelligent data catalog, delivering rapid data access throughout Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud
- Unified data governance within the Snowflake AI Data Cloud and throughout an enterprise’s data landscape, enabling easy data cataloging, classification, management, and policy and control execution
- Automated compliance monitoring for regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA with Alation’s comprehensive data lineage capabilities, tracking data movement across the Snowflake ecosystem and beyond
“Trust in data has become essential across all aspects of business, as data teams face challenges in ensuring data quality amid growing scrutiny from developers and decision-makers concerned about the downstream effects of analytics and AI applications,” said Tarik Dwiek, head of technology alliances at Snowflake. “The Alation Data Intelligence Platform makes information easily searchable and provides vital contextual information that transforms data into a valuable, actionable asset for strategic decisions.”
This news was announced at Snowflake’s annual user conference, Snowflake Data Cloud Summit 2024.
To learn more about Alation, please visit https://www.alation.com/.