Somewhere between a Snowflake permission and the storage bucket it ends up reaching, responsibility moves from the data team to the cloud security team, and neither team sees the whole path. Upwind says the Snowflake Security product it launched on October 1 is built to show that path for Snowflake accounts.

Snowflake is closing the sign-in gap, so attention moves to what accounts can reach

The 2024 attacks on Snowflake customers show the consequences of stolen credentials and weak sign-in controls. Mandiant traced every incident it investigated in the campaign to compromised customer credentials, and Mandiant and Snowflake together notified about 165 organizations whose data might have been exposed (Mandiant, 2024). The affected accounts lacked multi-factor authentication, and some of the stolen credentials stayed valid for years.

Snowflake is now phasing out single-factor password sign-ins. Its documentation schedules strong authentication for all users from August through October 2026, rolled out account by account, and it says those dates are subject to change. The Snowflake Trust Center, which scans customer accounts for security problems, also reports a multi-factor authentication readiness score for human and service users.

I read this as moving the main question from who can sign in to what a signed-in account can reach. That second question involves the data team, which grants Snowflake roles, and the security team, which looks after the cloud storage underneath.

Upwind says it can trace a Snowflake role to the storage behind it

According to Upwind's announcement, the product checks Snowflake settings against the Center for Internet Security Snowflake Benchmark, a published list of recommended settings, and builds an inventory from the account down to each database and schema, which is a grouping of tables and other objects inside a database. The inventory includes AI agents and servers built on the Model Context Protocol, a standard that lets agents connect to data and tools. Upwind also says it follows Snowflake stages and external volumes, which load and store data, to the cloud storage they point at, and that an engineer can pick a table or an agent and see which roles and users can reach it.

Agent access depends on user permissions and configured tools

Snowflake's documentation says a user needs a role with the Cortex agent privileges to invoke an agent. The agent's tools need the user's default role to have access to their underlying data, and custom tools built as stored procedures run with either the owner's or the caller's privileges, depending on how each procedure is set up.

Reviewing an agent means checking who can invoke it and which permissions its tools run under.

Once sign-in is locked down, the open question is what a signed-in account can reach.

The harder part is getting data teams to take on security work

Upwind says Snowflake findings go into the same priority list as its other cloud findings, with each one assigned to whoever owns the affected account, database or schema, and that the feature is available under Data sources in its console. A Snowflake finding becomes useful once someone on the data team agrees to fix it, and buyers should ask which person on that team will receive these findings and who decides when a role that helps analysts conflicts with a security finding.

Snowflake and Palo Alto Networks offer similar checks, each with different strengths

The Snowflake Trust Center already scans customer accounts, and its readiness score is a practical way to track the sign-in changes described above. Palo Alto Networks describes its Cortex Cloud product as showing which cloud storage a Snowflake warehouse can reach through external tables and where sensitive data moves between Snowflake and other systems, which suits companies that already use its platform.

Upwind emphasizes tracing Snowflake grants through storage integrations to the underlying cloud storage and ranking problems by what is running in production. It positions the feature as an extension of a platform that already covers the cloud account Snowflake runs on, which suits companies that use Upwind for the rest of their cloud security. Running all three against the same Snowflake account is the fair way to compare them.

Ask every vendor the same four things before you connect Snowflake

These checks apply to every option in this post, whether you choose Upwind, the Snowflake Trust Center or Palo Alto Networks:

• Confirm the level of access the tool needs in your Snowflake account and any cloud connections it requires.
• Confirm you can export your findings if you stop using the tool.
• Name the person on the data team who will receive the findings.
• Get written terms for what happens to your data and findings if the vendor is sold.

Check what happens to your contract if your security vendor changes owners

Amiram Shachar founded Upwind in 2022 with three partners from Spot, according to Calcalist. The company sells what the industry calls a cloud-native application protection platform, a single product that combines several cloud security tools. Globes describes Upwind's approach as adding runtime context, meaning it watches what is running in production and ranks problems by whether they are active, so teams can spend their time on the risks that matter most.

Upwind completed a financing round in January. Globes reported then that it raised $250 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, which brought its total raised to $430 million after a $100 million round in December 2024 (Globes, 2026). In September, Globes reported, citing sources, that another round of $300 million at a $3.8 billion valuation was nearing completion, led by Bessemer Venture Partners (Globes, 2026).

Independent cloud security companies are acquired often, and Globes' September report mentions Google's purchase of Wiz as a recent example. An acquisition is a normal outcome for any company in this market, and it can change who controls a product and decides how it develops.

A multi-year contract is easier to evaluate when it includes clear terms for what happens if ownership changes.