Data Lineage and Trust Center

1. Data Lineage and Trust Center

Governance isn't just about locking things down — it's also about visibility. Knowing where your data came from, what depends on it, and whether your account's security configuration is doing what you think it is. This video covers Data Lineage and the Trust Center.

2. The Visibility Problem

Imagine Claro's compliance dashboard stops returning data. Somewhere upstream, something changed — but what? Without a map of how objects connect, you're manually tracing dependencies. Now imagine a security audit asking which users have ACCOUNTADMIN access and whether service accounts authenticate without MFA. Without a centralized view, answering that means querying multiple system tables and hoping nothing was missed. Data lineage and the Trust Center make both problems traceable.

3. What is Data Lineage?

Data lineage is a map of object relationships in your Snowflake account. For any given object — a view, a table, a dynamic table — lineage tells you two things: what does this object depend on, and what depends on this object?

4. Reading the Lineage Graph in Snowflake

In Snowsight, lineage is visualised as a graph. Upstream objects appear on the left: your source data. Downstream dependencies appear on the right: the models, datasets, and outputs that depend on it. Follow the flow from left to right and you can trace exactly how data moves through your pipeline: from raw source tables, through feature engineering, into packaged datasets, and finally into trained models. If something changes upstream say a schema update or a renamed column, you can immediately see everything downstream that could be affected. Impact analysis in seconds, rather than hours of manual tracing.

5. Access History

Alongside lineage, Snowflake records Access History, a log of which objects were accessed, by which user, and at what time. This lives in ACCOUNT_USAGE under ACCESS_HISTORY. It captures not just direct table access but also indirect access through views: if an analyst queries a view that reads from a sensitive table, that underlying access is recorded. For Claro's compliance team, Access History answers audit questions like: who accessed the credit scores table in the last 30 days, and did any access happen outside business hours?

6. What is the Trust Center?

The Trust Center is Snowflake's built-in security monitoring hub. It runs automated checks against your account configuration and surfaces findings where your setup doesn't align with Snowflake's security recommendations. Beyond configuration monitoring, Trust Center also surfaces Sensitive Data Classification findings under its Data Security section , so you can discover PII exposure and security gaps from the same place. Think of it as a periodic security health check: it doesn't detect threats in real time, it flags configuration gaps. For Claro, that might mean ACCOUNTADMIN is granted to more users than recommended, or MFA is not enforced for privileged roles.

7. Scanner Packages and Findings

Trust Center checks are organized into scanner packages. The CIS Snowflake Benchmark maps to the Center for Internet Security's industry-standard recommendations. Snowflake Security Essentials covers Snowflake's own baseline checks. Threat Intelligence is the third package, it identifies risky users and suspicious activity patterns. Custom scanners can also be created for organization-specific requirements. Each package produces findings ranked by severity. A finding isn't a breach. It's a configuration gap. The Trust Center tells you what to look at; what you do about it is up to your security team.

8. Acting on Findings

Each Trust Center finding includes a summary of the violation and a recommended remediation. For example, a finding might recommend migrating human users away from password-only sign-ins by moving all users to SSO and disabling accounts that haven't signed in within the last 90 days. The Trust Center doesn't fix things for you -- but it gives you a clear, prioritized list of what needs attention and points you to the documentation to action it.

9. Let's practice!

Now it's your turn to explore lineage and Trust Center concepts. Let's practice.

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