Hadoop vendor Cloudera recently announced that it has acquired Gazzang, a startup specialising in encryption for big data environments, for an undisclosed fee. The acquisition of Gazzang is Cloudera’s first significant purchase and will allow companies with stringent security regulations to use the big data processing platform. The news comes less than a month after Cloudera’s competitor Hortonworks’ acquired a security company called XA Secure in May.
“Data security is no longer a check-box for IT organizations or operations departments, it has become a top business priority,” said Tom Reilly, CEO of Cloudera. “We’re entering a whole new era with the rise of the Industrial Internet and the Internet of Things where there is vastly more data being streamed from billions of devices. Centralizing and accessing that net-new data to unlock its value is therefore a challenge when you consider the security requirements. That’s what we’re solving now.”
Interestingly, Gazzang’s technology is not designed solely for Hadoop; it can also be integrated with Cassandra (Apache and DataStax), Couchbase, MongoDB, Amazon Elastic MapReduce and Pivotal’s Hadoop distribution. As Gigaom note, the more “service-oriented architectures pick up steam, [the] more applications will be attempting to access the same data stores, and as Cloudera continues to position itself as an “enterprise data hub,” it expects to be at the core of those environments.”
Although Cloudera has a number of security measures in place, the need for better security was heightened last year following the addition of YARN resource management tier in Hadoop 2. Given that YARN allows multiple workloads to run on Hadoop, customers had requested simple centralized security. According to reports, Gazzang’s team will try to tackle these security problems, while also addressing the challenges of encrypting and processing sensitive and legally protected data within the Hadoop ecosystem.
Read more here
(Image Credit: Garrett Heath)
