Open source analytic data management software provider Cloudera has taken some of its recently-raised cash to add more security to its offerings.
The company said this week it has bought Gazzang, a Texas-based maker of data security solutions for software-as-a-service (Saas) and big data.
Cloudera will add Gazzang’s data encryption and key management technology into Cloudera Enterprise, its platform for managing a pool of data through Apache Hadoop clusters which includes system and data management tools.
As a result, it says, regulated organizations will be able to use Cloudera Enterprise to meet compliance requirements. “Cloudera now offers encryption for all data-at-rest stored inside the Hadoop cluster – using an approach that is transparent to applications using the data, thereby minimizing the costs associated with enabling encryption,” the company said in a statement.
An article in Computerworld U.S. notes that Cloudera Enterprise already encrypts some data. Gazzang’s technology covers all data and metadata.
“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,” said Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly. “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.”
Companies considering putting workloads in public cloud environments against security concerns will now be able putt in place additional process-based access controls, the company said. Access to encrypted data can be restricted to only to authorized system functions – rather than specific users or roles – so a cloud administrator, who likely doesn’t need access to 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,” Cloudera says.