Cloudera recently acquired big data security vendor Gazzang to strengthen its security offerings for its Hadoop distribution and related offerings. Cloudera’s acquisition of Gazzang will provide “enterprise-grade data encryption and key management.” In addition, the Gazzang team will constitute the foundation of the Cloudera Center for Security Excellence dedicated to the development of comprehensive Hadoop security solutions. Cloudera’s acquisition of Gazzang comes weeks after the announcement of the acquisition of XA Secure by Hortonworks to obtain access to a comprehensive security solution for Hadoop that addresses issues such as user authentication, authorization and audit and control. That Cloudera and Hortonworks acquired dedicated Hadoop security companies in the space of a month illustrates the intensity of the need in the Big Data space to package proven Hadoop security technologies in conjunction with Hadoop deployments and third party tools for optimizing Hadoop analytics and data management. Cloudera, for example, actively contributes to the open source initiative Project Rhino that seeks to augment the data protection functionality of Hadoop and contribute the resulting code back to the Apache Software Foundation. The bottom line is that Hadoop security has suddenly emerged as an urgent vertical within the Big Data space that testifies to the increasing prevalence and scale of the deployment of Hadoop distributions in the enterprise.
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