Concept: Data warehousing giant Snowflake has released its first industry-specific data cloud. It aims to aid the financial services industry to collaborate across departments on data while addressing regulatory standards.

Nature of Disruption: An infrastructure-as-code approach to powering auditable, trackable, and reversible infrastructure deployment and management; stricter network, identity, and access policies designed to spot any suspicious activity; improved encryption with support for Bring Your Own Key (BYOK); and built-in classification and anonymization are among the augmented security features in Snowflake’s new data cloud. Businesses like HubSpot and Office Depot leverage Snowflake’s data storage and analytics platform to query and extract insights from their enormous, diverse pools of data. It is available on Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure, and its “data warehouse-as-a-service” status means businesses don’t have to bother about selecting and installing hardware and software — Snowflake handles it all.

Outlook: The finance industry, in particular, has unique security and regulatory compliance requirements, which is one of the reasons Snowflake is releasing its Financial Services Data Cloud. The Bozeman, Montana-based company already boasts a slew of financial services clients, including Allianz, Western Union, BlackRock, AXA, and the New York Stock Exchange, and it said that its product revenue from the sector has more than doubled year over year. With a more customized product, it is now seeking to double down on this growth. Amazon, BlackRock, Cognizant, Dataiku, Deloitte, and EY are among the companies that have partnered with Snowflake to offer additional services. Amazon’s FinSpace, for example, will now use Snowflake as one of its external data sources.

This article was originally published in Verdict.co.uk