About Client:
A healthcare education management leader coordinating programs across universities, hospitals, and accreditation bodies. The organization manages highly sensitive student and clinical datasets governed by HIPAA and FERPA, requiring strict controls on access, sharing, and auditability.
Background:
As part of its digital transformation journey, the client adopted Snowflake as its central data platform. This allowed the organization to consolidate multiple data sources into a unified, scalable, and high-performance cloud environment. Internally, Snowflake enabled faster reporting, improved analytics capabilities, and stronger governance.
However, while internal analytics matured, a major gap remained: secure data collaboration with external stakeholders such as universities, hospitals, and regulatory agencies. Existing sharing methods were inefficient, difficult to govern, and increasingly risky in a Snowflake HIPAA context.
Challenge:
The client’s traditional approach to external data sharing introduced several operational and compliance risks:
- High security exposure when sharing HIPAA- and FERPA-regulated data with third parties
- Manual extract-and-transfer workflows that were time-consuming and error-prone
- Lack of real-time access, forcing partners to work with outdated datasets
- Version control issues caused by multiple data copies, leading to reporting inconsistencies
- Limited governance and audit visibility, making compliance tracking difficult
These challenges directly impacted collaboration speed, data trust, and regulatory confidence.
