Amongst all the chaos of 2020, the Snowflake Inc. story is a fairytale of business success. Not content with having the biggest software initial public offering in history, Snowflake is continuing to break records.

Its first earnings report as a public company caused share prices to rocket up 40% in a week, and yesterday its market valuation leaped over industry giants IBM and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

Nick Speece (pictured), sales engineering manager at Snowflake Inc., spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed what makes Snowflake stand out from the crowd. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following content has been condensed for clarity.]

Snowflake operates only in the cloud. Why was that decision made, and how does that impact businesses’ analysis of data?  

Speece: Snowflake can’t exist anywhere but the cloud. Technology over the last five to 10 years has seen a move from what the cloud originally was — which was “I have a virtual machine in my data center. I’m going to run it on your stuff, not mine” — into more comprehensive service offerings like Snowflake.

We can’t reach the kind of scale that Snowflake operates at every day and that our customers demand without the technology of clouds like AWS. The technology has to be there. The underlying and underpinning architecture has to be there. Otherwise, our customers get left in the dark, and we can’t have that.

How does Snowflake address the security issue? 

Speece: I’ll start by saying our security is inherited from the wonderful security platform that AWS has underneath it. So we inherit all the security around data storage, the [Amazon Elastic] Compute [Cloud]. All of the different entities and endpoints that AWS already secures, Snowflake takes the same precautions. More than that, we’ve also built in role-based access control to ensure that people are getting access only to the data that they should be getting access to. We recently implemented data masking as well, so certain roles are not able to see unmasked data, but they can still do queries that use the underlying data to filter.

So there’s a lot of different capabilities built in: encryption at rest, encryption in flight, AES-256 encryption keys used in a hierarchical model. These are phenomenal security architectures that are paramount to the security of the folks that are using our platform. Because we know at the end of the day, the first day we have a leak in Snowflake is probably our last day in business. We’ve got to be good at security, which is why it’s our top priority.

For government organizations, AWS has helped us put a FedRAMP moderate certified Snowflake region together. Our security is built into all of our regions, although the FedRAMP regions are specialized in some of the encryption technology we use. But we always, always, always protect our users’ data, regardless of where it is.

What are some of the things that differentiate Snowflake from data warehouses and other folks in the market? 

Speece: The big difference is Snowflake was built natively for the cloud. We weren’t adapted to the cloud; we didn’t adopt the cloud. Snowflake was built from scratch to be in the cloud. And since this is the appropriate show to mention it, the primary difference between us is we were built to use object storage foundationally underneath our technology. That sounds nerdy, and it is, but it adds a tremendous amount of value.

If you think about how we used to collaborate 10 years ago, we’d have a spreadsheet that if I opened that spreadsheet for my share drive and you tried to open it at the same time, you’d get locked out. You’re told you couldn’t have it. Contrast that now with the massive Google Drive platform and Office 365. Object storage has changed the way that we collaborate on the same kinds of documents; multiple people interacting with one thing at one time without contention. That’s the reason why Snowflake has to operate in the cloud. We bring that same paradigm, multiple actors on a single object, and give you that source of truth — the truth that you need to make decisions.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Snowflake Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Snowflake nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE