Is your Platform Enterprise Ready?

A Comparison of Business-Critical Capabilities of Snowflake and Databricks

By:  James Dinkel

It’s no secret that AI runs on data, but the implications of that are profound. If AI is automating your business capabilities, you need AI-ready data that’s reliable, governed, and available on an enterprise-ready platform.So, let’s dig into Snowflake and Databricks to see how they stack up in terms of business-critical capabilities foundational to an enterprise-ready platform

Let’s start with the big question: What business-critical capabilities does a platform need to be an enterprise-ready platform? In my experience, three main business-critical capabilities are required:
  • Reliability (Managed Disaster Recovery): It must stay on (99.99% availability) and recover seamlessly across regions or clouds without manual intervention.
  • Advanced Security & Governance: It must have strong, baked-in security, governance and robust cyber defense.
  • Cross-Cloud Capability: It must be cross-cloud capable, running workloads wherever the business needs them.
Every customer must rigorously evaluate a platform’s disaster recovery strategies, security, governance, and cross-cloud capabilities to check their enterprise readiness.

1. Managed Disaster Recovery (DR)
Business continuity requires managed failover strategies across in-region, cross-region, and cross-cloud scenarios.

Snowflake (5 Stars): Snowflake provides proven, out-of-the-box disaster recovery across regions and clouds, successfully handling over 300 mission-critical application failovers during a major AWS outage in October 2025. This includes:

  • DR within a region: Allows for continuous operations during localized outages.
  • DR across regions: All data, roles, and security failover via URL redirection.
  • DR across clouds: The same process works across all cloud providers

Databricks(2 Stars): No managed DR, requires significant manual setup, often failing to meet enterprise availability needs.

  • DR within a region: Inconsistent; recovery can take up to 15 minutes, and some data types require manual intervention.
  • DR across regions: Not built-in. Customers must manually copy workspaces and policies, a process that can take months without guaranteeing uptime.
  • DR across clouds: Even harder, as many automation tools are not cross-cloud compatible, and cloning/replication features don’t carry over
2. Advanced Security and Governance

Advanced security and governance are vital for data protection, ensuring only authorized access at the right time and place. Core capabilities include:

Native cyber resilience: The ability to prevent, quickly detect, and recover from threats through immutable backups
Built-in access and privacy controls: To ensure data is accessed appropriately.

Native Cyber Resilience

Snowflake (5 Stars): Snowflake has built-in enterprise-grade cybersecurity features:

  • Trust Center: A single pane of glass for security, compliance, and governance.
  • Proactive features: Out-of-the-box threat detection, proactive prevention of leaked credentials, and contextual recommendations to fix issues.
  • Data Protection: Advanced networking, key management (Tri-Secret Secure), and data resiliency via compliance-grade WORM-style immutable backups.
Databricks (1 Star):  Databricks lacks comprehensive, native enterprise-grade cyber resilience, requiring customers to build their own defenses. Based on publicly available documentation, Databricks does not provide built-in proactive threat detection, unified security posture management, and WORM-compliant backups across workloads. As a result, customers subject to strict immutable storage/record-keeping regulations such as SEC 17a-4(f), SEC 18a-6(e), FINRA Rule 4511(c), and CFTC Rule 1.31(c)-(d) would need to rely on external storage or third-party controls to meet those obligations.

Built-in Access and Privacy Controls

Snowflake (5 Stars): Offers comprehensive security and governance capabilities, including:

  • Fine-grained access controls: (Role-based access controls – RBAC, Attribute-based access controls – ABAC) that ensure data isolation.
  • Advanced privacy controls: (Differential Privacy, Aggregation & Projection).
  • Built-in, secure sharing: Cross-region and cross-cloud data sharing is built in, with all the security and governance controls you need, making it more secure and simpler to manage.

Databricks (2 Stars): Has gaps in core security, governance, and privacy features:

  • Foundational controls like data isolation are missing: ABAC (in Preview) is deficient, lacking role concepts and require additional DIY or cloud-provider configurations rather than built-in isolations.
  • Few advanced, fine-grained access controls: Governed Tags, Data Classification, Data Quality Monitoring are still in preview, and they have no advanced privacy features.
  • Data Sharing governance not preserved: Databricks’ Delta Sharing does not currently preserve governance policies across shares, which introduces security considerations customers must manage manually.
3. Cross-Cloud Capabilities

Since most enterprises utilize more than one cloud, cross-cloud capabilities are essential and require cross-cloud administration and data sharing. We recently saw Amazon announcing preview of AWS Interconnect to connect with other cloud service providers (CSPs), starting in preview with Google Cloud as the first launch partner.  

Cross Cloud Administration

Snowflake (5 Stars): Snowflake is a truly multi-cloud data and AI platform with its organization feature that allows administrators to view, create, and manage all of their accounts across different regions and cloud platforms.

Databricks (1 Star): Databricks is a platform that runs on three cloud providers, but each workspace operates as a standalone environment, and there’s no unified view across them.

Cross-Cloud Data Sharing

Snowflake (5 Stars): Snowflake’s Snowgrid technology powers global, live, cross-cloud sharing. It is the only platform that delivers low-latency, zero-copy data sharing across clouds and regions.

Databricks (2 Stars): Databricks’ Delta sharing is not enterprise-ready. It requires manual setup, and cross-cloud sharing is prohibitively expensive due to per-query egress charges that can lead to significant cost surprises.

Summary

In this analysis, Snowflake offers the gold standard in business-critical, enterprise-ready features for operating a data and analytics organization at scale. This is especially important for regulated industries and advanced AI applications that demand absolute security and governance. The evaluations and comparisons in this analysis article reflect my professional opinion based on my experiences, observations of both platforms, and interpretation of the available information. For questions, or a discussion on how to bring best-in-class reliability, security, and data governance to your organization, please reach out to us at info@squadrondata.com.