Snowflake has completed an Infosec Registered Assessors Program (IRAP) PROTECTED-level assessment for its Google Cloud Melbourne region deployment. The assessment completes coverage across the three major hyperscalers operating in Australia.

Snowflake already holds IRAP PROTECTED assessments for its deployments on AWS and Azure. The Google Cloud assessment completes what the vendor described as a hyperscaler trifecta.

The IRAP programme is administered by the Australian Signals Directorate. IRAP assessments evaluate the effectiveness of a system's security controls, with public sector organisations using the outcomes to determine suitability for sensitive workloads.

Federal government agencies are the primary consumers of IRAP outcomes, though state and territory agencies also reference the assessments in procurement decisions.

Regional vice president for Australia Glenn McPherson said completion of the third assessment supports agencies modernising legacy environments and adopting AI on a governed data foundation.

Snowflake said the platform can support unifying fragmented data, secure data sharing without unnecessary duplication, AI and advanced analytics, and elastic scaling on governed data.

Australian Government policy under the Hosting Certification Framework and the Protective Security Policy Framework requires agencies to evaluate cloud services against specific security and data sovereignty criteria. IRAP assessment is one component of that evaluation, not a determination of fitness for any specific workload.

Each agency makes its own decision on residual risk acceptance, taking into account the system context and data classification.

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