Securing Customer Emails with Data Masking in Snowflake

Learning Objectives

Create and manage Snowflake roles with granular access privileges

Create users and assign multiple roles with a defined default role

Develop a data masking policy using role-based logic and regular expressions

Apply and validate data masking by querying tables under different roles

Overview

In today’s data-driven world, protecting sensitive customer information is more critical than ever. GlobalMart, a leading e-commerce giant, faces the challenge of securing customer emails in its Snowflake data warehouse without sacrificing data accessibility for its diverse teams. Failure to properly govern data access can lead to security vulnerabilities, compliance risks, and a loss of customer trust, impacting business operations and reputation.

You'll work through a hands-on scenario as a Junior Data Engineer at GlobalMart, completing four core tasks to implement a robust data security model. Using SQL in a Snowflake environment, you will work with a customer_orders table to secure sensitive information based on user roles.

What You'll Complete:

Write SQL statements to configure a role-based access control (RBAC) framework by creating four distinct roles with granular database, schema, and table privileges.
Develop a dynamic data masking policy from scratch, using a CASE statement to define the logic that returns different data based on the user's active role.
Implement partial data masking for specific roles using the REGEXP_REPLACE function to conceal sensitive parts of an email address, and apply the completed policy to the customer_email column.

By the end, you'll have completed four tasks and written the SQL queries needed to build and apply a complete data masking solution from start to finish. You will be able to implement role-based security, protect sensitive data, and validate access rules in Snowflake.
Submit your SQL code snippets and answers to the multiple choice questions to demonstrate your solutions.

Prerequisites

Ability to write basic SQL including CREATE TABLE and INSERT statements
Understanding of Snowflake’s object hierarchy like databases, schemas, and tables
Familiarity with role-based access control and using GRANT to assign privileges
Awareness of data masking as a concept for protecting sensitive information