Admin
(INFORMATIONWEEK)–“The leading Hadoop platform is now the most secure.”
Commercial Hadoop vendor Cloudera announced Tuesday that they had successfully purchased big data security firm Gazzang, stepping up their game to offer their customers encryption as well as security solutions to issues of storing, processing and analyzing of data.
VP of products Charles Zedlewski says that Cloudera is no stranger to security but that in the past the company had dismissed encryption of data at rest, a critical part of data security. Gazzang will offer Cloudera customers assurance with this missing piece, joined at the hip with an innovative management system built to secure protected data within Hadoop clusters.
“We realized that this was basically adding months to deployment processes and our whole mission is to accelerate people’s ability to take advantage of big data,” Zedlewski said. “It was incumbent on us to take ownership of this aspect of data security.”
“Traditional” data management businesses like IBM or Oracle, as Zedlewski notes, are possessive of their customers and rope them in to avoiding purchasing from competing data security firms.
“It’s not out of the ordinary in terms of what you’d expect from your data management platform.”
The acquisition of Gazzang’s encryption products and services, according to Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly, will improve upon the mobility of tasks from development to production, alleviating concerns from consumers about movement into a public cloud.
“Companies that are weighing the value of putting workloads in public cloud environments against security concerns will now be able to move forward by putting in place additional process-based access controls,” Reilly said. “This limits access to encrypted data only to authorised system functions–rather than specific users or roles—so a cloud administrator who likely does not need access to the sensitive encrypted data, cannot run commands that grant them access. This is critical for compliance initiatives that require organizations to restrict data access based on ‘business need to know’.”
As big data increases with the growth of technology, the potential risk of cyber attacks and data loss expands to a larger scope, demanding much more of data security and encryption services–a necessary step for rule structures like HIPAA and PCI. Gazzang will be supporting Cloudera’s existing work on their latest venture with Intel, Project Rhino, an open source appendage built to add data protection to Hadoop products. Information security has many concerns in securing big data, protecting it for any and all potential breaches in the long-term.
“In this world of big data, people are ever more concerned about privacy and how all this data and people are being tracked and how that can be misused,” Zedlewski said. “A lot of the non-regulated industries have created internal policies that are effectively like regulations, that have the same requirements for data protection. While there’s tremendous potential in big data, it also represents a big opportunity for reputation risk.”
