On Thursday, Hortonworks announced the acquisition of XA Secure, a company that delivers security solutions for Hadoop. XA Secure provides an integrated suite of Hadoop security solutions that addresses security concerns involving Administration, Authentication, Authorization, Audit and Data Protection as illustrated below:
Source: Hortonworks Blog and InformationWeek Hortonworks’ Security Buy
To date, Hortonworks has worked on security issues related to access control in HDFS, DBA-compatible grant or revoke functionality for Apache Hive and a single point of secure access to Hadoop clusters by means of Apache Knox. XA Secure provides an integrated security solution for Hadoop that centralizes security management, authenticates users, integrates access control policies, provides a comprehensive audit trail and protects data in motion and at rest. The XA Secure solution works with batch Hadoop solutions in addition to real-time Hadoop solutions and interactive SQL. True to its open-source roots, Hortonworks plans to enhance XA Secure and then return the results to the open source community by incubating a new project within the Apache Software Foundation in the latter half of 2014. Hortonworks will make XA Secure available to Hortonworks customers under the branding HDP Security in late June 2014. The decision by Hortonworks to purchase XA Secure with the intent of open-sourcing the technology once it has matured represents an astute play to carve out a leadership position in the rapidly evolving Hadoop security space by delivering one of the first turnkey Hadoop security solutions available today, Cloudera’s Apache Sentry admitted and notwithstanding. In the meantime, however, Hortonworks customers stand to enjoy enhanced security functionality as the XA Secure acquisition becomes progressively integrated into the Hortonworks Data Platform and experiences a slew of enhancements slotted into an aggressive product development timeline.
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