How Fortune Brands Unified Data Cataloging and Security with Alation and ALTR

Fortune Brands Innovations (FBIN) is a leader in home and security products, with a portfolio of trusted brands like Moen, Master Lock, and Therma-Tru. While consumers may not recognize the holding company name, you’d be hard pressed to find a modern consumer who doesn’t rely on a FBIN product daily. 

The diversity of its portfolio has posed unique data integration challenges. As FBIN consolidated data across its subsidiaries, it faced a massive challenge: how to ensure secure, governed, and accessible data at scale—without slowing down innovation.

With Snowflake as its modern data platform, FBIN aimed to unify its fragmented ecosystem. But to truly succeed, the company needed an integrated solution for data cataloging and security—one that could empower both technical and nontechnical users. Enter: Alation and ALTR.

The following blog is based on a public presentation from Snowflake Summit 2025.

Key challenges for Fortune’s data team

As FBIN migrated its data environment to Snowflake, it faced a host of challenges common in enterprise environments:

• Fragmented data ecosystems: Parent subsidiary brands used different tech stacks, tools, and data structures, making holistic reporting inconsistent and labor-intensive.

• Inconsistent governance and visibility: Sensitive data lived in different places, with varying standards around who could access it and how.

• Manual workloads for data engineers: With limited engineering resources, FBIN needed a way to delegate governance tasks safely to business users.

• Limited self-service capabilities: Business data stewards lacked tools to understand data classification or control access without deep technical skills.

And perhaps most critically, FBIN required granular access control—ensuring that holding company personnel couldn’t view brand-level sensitive data unless authorized.

Objectives for data strategy

With support from ALTR, FBIN's data strategy leaders set a clear vision for the initiative:

1. Centralize data in Snowflake to streamline analytics and unify reporting.

2. Empower data stewards within each brand to manage data quality and security without needing engineering intervention.

3. Implement a tightly integrated security solution with Alation’s data catalog for seamless classification and access control.

4. Enable self-service governance that balances agility with compliance.

As Laura Malins of ALTR put it, “We wanted to empower teams to operate and innovate with data—with confidence.”

Implementation: Seamless integration with Alation, ALTR, and Snowflake

Once Alation was firmly established as the system of record for metadata and governance at Fortune Brands Innovations (FBIN), the team sought to extend its data protection capabilities without introducing friction into the user experience. Enter ALTR—a Snowflake-native platform that brings powerful, policy-based data security into the mix. Together, these tools delivered an elegant solution to unify governance, classification, and access control.

The integration process unfolded in four coordinated stages, each streamlining key responsibilities between platforms:

The process

Classification with ALTR

ALTR automatically scans datasets for sensitive information—such as names, email addresses, and credit card numbers—without ever ingesting or storing complete rows. It classifies fields according to sensitivity and pushes those results directly back into Snowflake for downstream action.

Tagging in Alation

Data stewards then use Alation’s SDK to retrieve these classification results and apply object tags within Snowflake. Tags are color-coded to reflect sensitivity levels (e.g., red for payment card information, yellow for email addresses), making it easy to standardize treatment across datasets.

Policy creation in ALTR

Using ALTR’s no-code interface, business users define access rules that automatically govern how data is exposed:

• Public roles see only masked data.

• Admin roles can access unmasked, full-detail data.

• Custom alerts trigger on unusual behavior, like accessing sensitive fields outside of business hours.

Policy enforcement in Snowflake

Finally, ALTR deploys those access rules into Snowflake, where they are enforced in real-time—without disrupting analytics or slowing performance.

Key technical advantages

This seamless integration offered more than just functionality—it delivered real operational advantages. Each element played a role in reducing complexity while improving control, leading to a streamlined, scalable solution.

• Snowflake native app: ALTR’s integration with Snowflake made deployment fast and straightforward.

• Custom fields in Alation: Classification metadata is displayed directly in Alation, simplifying the steward workflow.

• TagbBased policies: Centralized tag management reduces the need for column-by-column rule creation.

• Audit & alerting: ALTR provides comprehensive logging and notifications for governance and compliance teams.

As Malins explained, “We like to think of Alation as the brain—and ALTR as the muscle.”

Results

The integrated Alation-ALTR-Snowflake solution delivered significant benefits for FBIN:

• Improved visibility: Data stewards could easily discover where sensitive data lived and apply consistent policies.

• Reduced reliance on engineering: Business teams now manage data access directly, freeing engineers to focus on development.

• Streamlined compliance: Audit logs and classification results support governance and regulatory needs.

• Accelerated rollout: The Snowflake Native App approach simplified onboarding and shortened time to value.

• Enhanced self-service: Business users gained the tools and confidence to drive their own analytics securely.

Perhaps most impressively, the system allows FBIN to balance agility with control. Sensitive data is masked automatically based on user roles—enabling teams to move fast without compromising security.

Conclusion: Laying the foundation for scalable, secure growth

FBIN’s journey is far from over. With data now consolidated, classified, and governed, the company is building a scalable foundation for trusted analytics, AI, and innovation.

By choosing ALTR and Alation, FBIN ensured that governance wouldn’t be a blocker—but a strategic enabler. “The real success is that nontechnical data stewards can now understand, tag, and protect data—all from within tools they already use,” said Malins.

As FBIN looks ahead, its focus is on expanding these capabilities across its cloud data estate, increasing automation, and enhancing monitoring and alerting for proactive security.

“If you're wondering how to make data both governed and accessible,” Malins concluded, “the answer is integration—between your catalog, your security platform, and your warehouse.”

Curious to learn how a data catalog can help you up-level your data strategy? Book a demo with us today.  Or, see how Domain Group leveraged Alation with Snowflake to accelerate data discovery in the video below: