White paper: Accelerate SOC 2 compliance with Snowflake and Vanta

Executive summary 

The Snowflake Vanta partnership accelerates SOC 2 compliance for Native App developers by enabling inheritance of up to 40% of technical controls from Snowflake and streamlining the rest via Vanta. This reduces compliance time by 30-40%, transforming it from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage, complemented by an exclusive 30% discount on Vanta for Snowflake customers.

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Introduction: The imperative of secure compliance in the data Ccoud

Security compliance has become the new gatekeeper to enterprise sales. What once differentiated companies now serves as the minimum threshold for market entry—particularly SOC 2 certification, which has emerged as the essential "security passport" for North American SaaS providers.

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The challenge is stark, traditional compliance approaches consume 6-12 months of engineering resources, creating a fundamental tension between security requirements and product innovation. This bottleneck particularly impacts startups and growth-stage companies, where every engineering hour diverted from core development can mean the difference between market leadership and irrelevance.

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Snowflake Native Apps fundamentally alter this equation through architectural inheritance. By executing code within Snowflake's enterprise-grade infrastructure rather than extracting data to external applications, Native Apps automatically inherit proven security controls—eliminating the need to build them from scratch.

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The strategic partnership between Snowflake and Vanta transforms this architectural advantage into measurable business outcomes: up to 40% faster SOC 2 certification, significant cost reductions, and the ability to focus engineering talent on product differentiation rather than compliance overhead.

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This whitepaper demonstrates how forward-thinking application providers are leveraging this partnership to turn compliance from competitive burden into competitive advantage.

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Understanding Snowflake, Vanta, and Native Apps

Snowflake: The AI Data Cloud

Snowflake provides a unified platform for data storage, processing, and AI operations that fundamentally reimagines cloud data architecture. Unlike traditional databases and data warehouses, Snowflake's multi-cluster, shared-data architecture separates storage from compute, enabling unlimited concurrent workloads without performance degradation. Key capabilities include:

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• Seamless cross-cloud and cross-region data sharing
• Advanced data governance and security controls
• Native support for structured and semi-structured data
• Workload-optimized compute resources

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The Snowflake Marketplace serves as a central hub where thousands of organizations exchange live, ready-to-query data and applications. This ecosystem creates a network effect that extends Snowflake's value beyond its core infrastructure, enabling customers to monetize data assets and access third-party data without complex ETL processes.

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Vanta: Automated security and compliance

Vanta's Trust Management Platform eliminates manual security and compliance work through continuous automation. With 375+ integrations, Vanta automatically tests controls in real-time, helping organizations efficiently achieve critical security milestones like SOC 2 certification.

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Founded with the initial goal of streamlining SOC 2 examination, Vanta has evolved over six years to offer a comprehensive compliance solution that includes:

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• Continuous control monitoring with hourly automated tests
• Integrated vendor risk management capabilities
• Streamlined risk assessment workflows
• A purpose-built audit experience with Vanta-trained auditors

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Internal, continuous monitoring of controls is made easy through Vanta’s many integrations and the outputs of hourly, automated tests. The platform's real-time monitoring immediately flags failed tests before audit windows, while passing tests provide confidence during preparation for external assessments. This approach transforms compliance from periodic, resource-intensive projects into an ongoing, automated process. 

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Native Apps: The next evolution in data applications

Snowflake Native Apps represent a paradigm shift in application architecture by bringing code to data rather than the traditional approach of extracting data to applications. Built and deployed within the Snowflake Data Cloud, these applications leverage Snowflake's infrastructure, tools, and security model to create a fundamentally more secure application paradigm.

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Native Apps run directly in a customer's Snowflake account—eliminating the need for external servers, APIs, or integration layers

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With the Native App Framework, Snowflake enables Providers to configure secure, on-platform collaboration within the shared responsibility model. [1] Consumers of Native Apps should always perform their own security reviews before procuring a Native App to ensure it meets their security requirements. 

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[1] Providers remain responsible for the security of their Native Apps with respect to their Consumers. See Snowflake’s Provider and Consumer Terms for details.

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The Snowflake Vanta partnership: Key advantages

By using Snowflake and Vanta for your application, the sum is greater than the combination of the parts. Not only will you get a framework for a native application package and a tool to ensure your application is compliant with SOC 2 (or other frameworks): 

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• Exclusive Pricing Benefits: Snowflake customers will receive a 30% discount on Vanta.

• The Control Inheritance Savings: The native app framework delivers significant security advantages through three deployment models:
  
  • Ring 0: Applications run exclusively within the consumer's account with no external communication, providing maximum security isolation and control inheritance
  • Ring 1: Applications operate primarily in the consumer's account while sending logging data back to the provider's Snowflake account
  • Ring 2: Applications connect to infrastructure managed outside of Snowflake while maintaining core functionality within the Data Cloud

Each deployment model offers different levels of control inheritance from Snowflake's enterprise-grade security infrastructure. The most controls are inherited by Ring 0 apps and the least are inherited by Ring 2 apps because of the app provider’s responsibility related to the external infrastructure. This flexibility enables developers to strategically balance security requirements with operational flexibility.

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Depending on your SOC 2 control activities and native app’s deployment level, control points spanning vulnerability management, encryption and key management, physical security, network security, and infrastructure maintenance can be inherited from Snowflake, saving time while maintaining a strong security compliance posture. Please refer to the Appendix for a comprehensive mapping of inherited controls.

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• Native App Security Architecture Advantages:
  
  • Limited Data Movement: Snowflake's code-to-data architecture enhances security by executing code within its secure environment (depending on the ring of the app), reducing the need to move sensitive data externally. 
  • Granular Access Controls: Snowflake’s fine-grained access controls allow precise permission settings for users, complimented by continuous auditing and real-time threat detection. 
  • Built-in data residency: Apps run in customer's region and cloud, to help enable customer’s GDPR and regulatory compliance. 

• Implementation Cost Savings: 
  
  • Rely on Snowflake controls for up to 20% of overall SOC 2 requirements (up to 40% of technical controls). For example, reduce costs associated with encryption management and operational overhead by leveraging Snowflake's patching, key rotation, and firewall management.
  • Enabling you to focus engineering resources on core product features instead of compliance infrastructure.

• Time-to-Certification Acceleration: 
  
  • The aforementioned savings amount to a potential 30-40% decrease in time to prepare for a SOC 2 report. For example, with Vanta streamlining readiness activities and Native App developers inheriting a significant portion of Snowflake’s technical controls, SOC 2 prep can shrink by months depending on the type of report and scope. 
  • Savings also help organizations hone in on the critical tasks they need to focus on, via the Shared Responsibility Model, such as application security, governance processes, risk management, change management, and third party risk management. 

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Success stories: Partner experiences

Audience Acuity

By leveraging Snowflake’s Native Apps, Audience Acuity introduced an additional deployment option that significantly streamlined the implementation process—eliminating the need for extensive manual documentation while inheriting built-in security and compliance controls. Compared to traditional AWS-based deployment models, the Native App approach was simpler, more secure, and offered faster time-to-value by avoiding data movement.

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“The shift from a purely on-prem implementation to also offering a Native App deployment minimized the potential level of effort from 80 hours (on-prem) to as little as one hour (Native App),” explained Robert Ellison, COO at Audience Acuity. “This enables us to meet customers where they are—whether they prefer an embedded on-premise solution or a more streamlined, Snowflake-native experience.”

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Audience Acuity has always maintained rigorous internal security and compliance standards. As the company expanded its deployment offerings and customer footprint, the team recognized the value of streamlining external attestations and accelerating the path to SOC 2 certification. To support this, Audience Acuity partnered with Vanta.

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“With Vanta’s automated testing, pre-built templates, and continuous monitoring,” Robert noted, “we achieved a SOC 2 Type 1 report in just six months—with minimal disruption to our core team.” Together, Snowflake and Vanta empowered Audience Acuity to scale efficiently, offer flexible deployment paths, and reinforce customer trust through certified, modern security practices.

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Maxa

Maxa's compliance journey exemplifies the operational advantages achievable through Vanta's compliance automation platform and Snowflake's Native App infrastructure solutions. Under the leadership of Henri Trouillard, VP of Operations, the organization successfully achieved a SOC 2 Type 1 within a five-month timeline—a notably expedited process for a first-time compliance implementation.

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The dual-platform approach yielded multiple operational efficiencies: streamlined vendor evaluation and selection processes and automated compliance workflow management through Vanta, and Snowflake's established security framework to minimize direct data handling requirements. Critically, this infrastructure combination enabled Maxa to secure enterprise-level customer contracts that had previously been inaccessible due to compliance prerequisites.

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As Henri Trouillard' noted, "The combination of SOC 2 and Native Apps enabled Maxa to secure high-value customers that would have otherwise been unattainable"—demonstrating measurable business impact beyond regulatory compliance, including accelerated revenue growth and enhanced market positioning through established trust frameworks.

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Getting started with the partnership program

Step-by-step implementation guide

Prior to implementing a native app, it’s essential that deployers align their application with their architectural, security, and operational strategy and requirements. Questions to ask include, but are not limited to; What is the business problem our app solves? What data will the app access? What compliance frameworks will be applicable to our app and customers?  After completing planning, the organization will have the inputs needed to decide on a Ring 0, 1,or 2 Native App deployment model. 

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Once the app is deployed, organizations can use Vanta to assess compliance against relevant frameworks and begin the journey of providing assurance to their customers and partners by using Vanta to streamline a SOC 2 report. 

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Snowflake customers, who wish to leverage Vanta’s services, sign up with Vanta directly. Vanta will own and manage the customer relationship—including all onboarding activities—and customers will be bound by Vanta’s standard terms and conditions. Snowflake is not a party in this agreement.

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Resources and support

• About the Snowflake Native App Framework
• Apply for compliance badging for your listing
• Vanta’s SOC 2 Collection: Get the expertise you need to get your SOC 2. Learn about SOC 2 concepts, how to prepare for an audit, and more.

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Appendix

SOC 2 control inheritance description

Native app providers can potentially inherit the following controls from Snowflake’s infrastructure (depending on their specific implementation):

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1. Network and System Security Controls

• Host-based vulnerability scans are performed quarterly on external-facing systems, with critical and high vulnerabilities tracked to remediation.
• The company uses an intrusion detection system for continuous network monitoring and early breach detection.
• Firewalls are used and configured to prevent unauthorized access, with rulesets reviewed at least annually.
• Infrastructure is patched routinely and in response to identified vulnerabilities to maintain system hardening.
• An infrastructure monitoring tool is used to track systems, infrastructure, and performance, generating alerts based on thresholds.

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2. Data Protection and Encryption Controls

• Datastores housing sensitive customer data are encrypted at rest.
• Secure data transmission protocols are used to encrypt data sent over public networks.
• Privileged access to encryption keys is restricted to authorized users with a business need.

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3. Access Control and Authentication 

• Authentication to production datastores requires secure mechanisms like unique SSH keys.
• Physical access to data centers is controlled through authorization processes for granting, changing, and terminating access.
• Access to data centers is reviewed at least annually.
• Visitors must sign in, wear badges, and be escorted in secure areas.

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4. Data Management and Retention 

• The data backup policy outlines requirements for customer data backup and recovery.
• Customer data with confidential information is purged or removed from the environment according to best practices upon service termination.

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