Strengthening its security offerings, Cloudera, which provides Hadoop based software and services, has acquired Gazzang, which provides data security solutions and expertise to help enterprises protect sensitive information. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The addition will add enterprise-grade data encryption and key management, addressing the challenges associated with securing and processing sensitive and legally protected data within the Hadoop ecosystem, and fulfilling a requirement in myriad compliance regulations like HIPAA-HITECH, PCI-DSS, FERPA and the EU Data Protection Directive.
"Data security is no longer a checkbox for IT organizations or operations departments, it has become a top business priority," said Tom Reilly, chief executive officer, Cloudera. "At the same time compliance requirements for protecting data continue to expand in scope where data access comes under scrutiny. 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."
According to Cloudera, while its customers will continue to have a choice of a broad range of cross-platform data protection methods available from Cloudera partners, 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.
Cloudera plans to target the efforts of the Gazzang team on additional security challenges in Hadoop. The team will become the heart of the Cloudera Center for Security Excellence focusing exclusively on Hadoop security, including comprehensive data and cluster security technologies; security testing and certification; and security ecosystem partner enablement, with security integration APIs and certified partner products.
Cloudera is also continuing to invest in the open source community to improve security features with project Rhino—an open source effort founded by Intel in early 2013. Project Rhino is a broad based open source security architecture addressing many of the major pillars of enterprise security including: perimeter security, entitlements and access control and data protection.
For more information about Cloudera, go to www.cloudera.com.