Intent-Driven Governance: Protect Sensitive Data at Scale
Snowflake, Wednesday, September 9th, 2026
Expressing governance as intent rather than per-object rules, so policy keeps pace with data growth.
Snowflake describes intent-driven governance, where teams express what should be protected and why rather than writing per-object access rules that must be maintained as data grows.
The problem it addresses is that rule-based governance does not scale: every new table requires a policy decision, so coverage degrades continuously as data outpaces the governance team.
Expressing intent lets policy apply automatically to newly arriving data matching a classification. The design question is how classification accuracy is established and monitored, since the model depends on it.