 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. Welcome to theCUBE virtual and our coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, the specialized programming for Worldwide Public Sector. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm joined by Nick Spieth, the Chief Federal Technologist for Snowflake. Nick, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. Likewise, Chief Federal Technologist. That's the first time I've ever heard of that title. Tell me a little bit about that. It's probably the last time you'll hear it. So Chief Federal Technologist is really somebody in the company who is focused on bringing the needs of the federal government back to our corporate headquarters, making sure that the product as it's developed and evolves has the federal requirements in mind. Excellent. So the last couple of months for Snowflake, biggest IPO in software history, your market cap right now is at 66 billion, 515 data workloads running on Snowflake's platform every day, 250 petabytes of data under management. A lot is going on. Let's talk about Snowflake. You guys operate only in the cloud. Why was that decision made and how does that impact businesses analysis of data? Yeah, so great question. And the answer is actually in the opening that you gave for us. And thank you for that reinforcement. Snowflake can't exist anywhere but the cloud. Technology over the last five to 10 years has really seen a move from what the cloud originally was, which was I have a virtual machine in my data center, I'm gonna 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. And especially today as data volumes are massively increasing and we know that that's only going to go up. We know that IT is only going to be more complex but when we talk to businesses in any industry, the value of the data is in the insights, the ability to extract that data in real time, glean insights from it so that businesses can make this data-based decisions that pivot their business, especially critical during the year that we have now known as 2020. Talk to me a little bit about though, digging into your marketing material, everyone, there's all these terms right that everyone uses and you guys use single source of truth. What does it actually mean for Snowflake? Yeah, so we talk about cloud, we talk about single source of truth and when you're looking at data problems, the problem and the solution are the same thing. A massive amount of data is a raw resource, that's all it is and trying to refine that raw resource into something that is insightful or something that is useful to a business process is a challenge that every customer in every market in every region undergoes and how you overcome that is critical. And one of the primary focuses of Snowflake is to evolve the data cloud. Snowflake platform is the underlying technology for the data cloud, but the data cloud is where we're going and what I mean by data cloud, if you have a data set, your internal data, that is your truth, but it might not be the truth. So in Snowflake, we encourage our customers to collaborate on data sets. For example, if you want to know how many people are living in a certain borough in New York City, you could go around with a clicker and count everyone or you could just ask the Census Bureau. That's the nature of the data cloud and what we're talking about here, going to the subject matter experts who have the data that you need, using our marketplace, using our private exchanges, using our data sharing to build your own data cloud and become part of the next gen architecture for data sharing and collaboration to get to the source of the truth, to make better decisions, to gain better insights. It's great to combine your data with enriched data from other sources, especially when it comes to making federal decisions and governance decisions. Absolutely, that's critical that the biggest challenge customers have is being able to sort through all that and find, I like how you put this as their single source of truth. Can you give us some examples of some federal agencies, maybe even just anonymously, that are using the power of Snowflake to do just that? Absolutely, we've got customers in the healthcare space and in some of the law enforcement spaces and especially in public education that are trying to increase the awareness of the folks that are subscribing to their services. For example, folks that are looking for healthcare help. If you're filing claims for certain healthcare providers or certain care facilities, we wanna make sure that those claims that are forwarded to those entities are legitimate, first of all, for example, if you're filing a claim for knee surgery in Florida, you probably didn't have one in California three hours later. So those kinds of enforcement activities and not just trying to do audits, but also to benefit everybody who's receiving care. There's a lot of push now about genetic sequencing, DNA and RNA vaccination is huge with COVID-19. Getting access to massive amounts of data to do analysis against and figure out the best approach, that's critical for where we go in the next 10 to 15 years in healthcare. Snowflake is very, very honored and happy to be propelling that move in the healthcare space. It is, that's gonna be absolutely critical. But we're also seeing it everywhere else, such as for universities and education and suddenly this need the last few months for real time learning. Talk to me about data analysis. Can Snowflake help companies? You talked about enriching data sets, so not just companies sources of data, but additional data sets that they can add in and evaluate and analyze to make great decisions. But from a historical real time perspective, talk to me how Snowflake helps with that data analysis. Yeah, sure. So Snowflake in and of itself can do some analysis work. We've got some great visualization tools in our new UI that was released recently on public preview. So there's some analysis tools built into Snowflake, but really where the value comes from is in taking your tools that you already used today and connecting it to a data source, a platform that can wrangle that data, that can move that data through automated pipelines to give you a modeled view of that data that's beneficial. For example, data scientists and data engineers spend 80% of their time, and I know a lot of statistics are made up on the spot. That was not, I promise. But trying to move this data through and refine it and build features to get to the point where you can ask a question, is 80% of these very valuable professionals' time. Shortening those timelines is what Snowflake really aims to do in the analysis space. We're not trying to replace the analysis tools that you use today. We work fine with all of them. The big difference is presenting them with enough data volume to give you real insights and eliminate bias as much as we can in datasets. What are some of the things that differentiate Snowflake from data warehouses and other folks in the market? Yeah, great question. The big difference is Snowflake was built natively for the cloud. We weren't adapted to the cloud. We didn't adopt the cloud at some point in the future. 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. And I know that sounds really 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 told you couldn't have it. And if tradition stays true, I would probably be on vacation for two weeks. Contrast that now with the massive Google Doc platform in 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 absolutely need to make decisions. And that's critical these days. As we know, we're living in uncertain times and one of the things I think we can't expect is the uncertainty to continue, but also for many industries, people to stay remote or some big percentage for quite a while. So the ability to have those collaboration tools and be able to collaborate in real time is table stakes for so many companies. But when we're talking about some of the things going on this year, security, we can't not talk about security. All these folks from home, accessing corporate networks, maybe not through VPNs or behind firewalls, the cloud is paramount to that. How does Snowflake address the security issue? Absolutely. So 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 EC compute, all of the different entities and end points 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 that, which is why it's our top priority. I didn't ever talk about security as an inherited. It must be a dominant trade if we're going to be talking about, you know, genetics and chromosomes and mRNA and things like that. So walk me through last question, a government organization, or say they're an AWS customer or they want to start using Snowflake. What's that process? How do they go about doing that to leverage those inherited security capabilities that you talked about? Well, thankfully AWS has helped us put a FedRAMP moderate certified Snowflake region together in AWS East Commercial. So we're very happy to have a FedRAMP moderate region. They can access Snowflake through the AWS Marketplace or from Snowflake.com. You can start a trial in just a couple of minutes. 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. You make it sound easy, I got to say. That's because it is. Thank you, Cloud. That's good in it. Well, that's good and it should be especially because there's so much complexity and uncertainty everywhere else in the world right now. Last question for you, as I mentioned in the beginning, the biggest IPO in software history just a couple of months ago during probably one of the most strangest time of any of us have ever and our relatives ever witnessed, what is, what can we expect from Snowflake in 2021? Are you going to bring all the good vibes that we all need? Well, good vibes is our business model. Snowflake is a phenomenal platform. We've had a ton of success driven by the success of our cloud provider partners, driven by the success of our wonderful customers. We have over 4,000 people using Snowflake now to great effect. You can look for more features, you'll look for more functions but really the evolution of the data cloud. Our big push is to help our customers get into the data cloud, get the truth out of their data and make better decisions every day. And you'll see more of that from us as time continues. One more question I wanted to sneak in. How do you work with those customers to evolve the data cloud? What's that feedback loop like? It's a lot of it comes down to silos that customers have built up over years and years and years of operation. That's the first step. In Snowflake, there isn't such thing really as a data silo. There's data put into Snowflake, everything is unified. You can do queries across databases. That's the first thing. The second thing is browsing our data marketplace. It's just like an app store for your phone but instead it's datasets. And the datasets are published by the experts who know that material better than anyone. I mentioned earlier, bringing in everything from housing valuation data to COVID-19 data from California and Boston, bringing in World Health Organization data, John Hopkins University data, joining that with the data that you already used today along with weather and population counts. The main thing here, the strategy is almost endless. More and more datasets are being published every day. We have over a hundred contributors in the marketplace now. That's exciting that we have the technology and the power like this to help the world recover from such a crazy time. It's nice to know that there is the power of that behind that. And the smart folks like you, chief federal technologists helping to fine tune that and really ensure that organizations across the government can maximize the value of data and find their single source of truth. Nick, it's been a blast having you on theCUBE. Thank you for joining me. Thank you for having me. For Nick's Peace, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Virtual.