Published on the 26/03/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
As the role of big data grows in the enterprise, organisations are looking to replicate information governance and security practices associated with other mission critical systems…
For organisations developing big data capabilities Hadoop often plays a central role. An open source tool used to analyse unstructured data Hadoop is already widely deployed – but, according to Gartner, IT professionals are apparently overlooking some of the security issues associated with the tool.
In a recent blog post Gartner analyst Merv Adrian noted that only two percent of respondents to a poll of 600 Hadoop users cited Hadoop’s lack of robust security as an impediment to adoption.
“For me, the nearly non-existent response to the security issue is shocking. Can it be that people believe Hadoop is secure? Because it certainly is not. At every layer of the stack, vulnerabilities exist, and at the level of the data itself there numerous concerns.” Adrian said that the lack of security focus was particularly galling given early adopters included healthcare organisations and retailers which had access to large volumes of personal data.
It’s this issue that San Francisco-based software start-up Zettaset is attempting to address with its Orchestrator encryption tools. The organisation last year announced a tool set able to encrypt data in the Hadoop stack when it was “at rest”. It has now announced a tool able to encrypt big data as it moves around the Hadoop stack, which will be available in the second quarter of the year.
According to chief executive officer Jim Vogt; “We are taking open source technology and hardening it for production settings.” Speaking to iStart this week he said that a number of enterprises have been “tyre-kicking” big data analysis, waiting for enterprise grade tools before plunging ahead with major deployments.
He said that for enterprises in sectors such as healthcare, which recognised the patient and financial benefits associated with better information analysis, there was a need to protect audit trails and sensitive data.
Eric Murray, Zettaset’s security architect, said that the encryption tools should also provide some comfort to organisations concerned about concerted information surveillance attempts. “If you are worried about the NSA getting into your Hadoop cluster then this would be the technology to protect you.”
Vogt acknowledged that eventually the open source community which develops Hadoop was likely to address lingering security issues, but he claimed that could still take 18 months to complete.
Although the company is not yet selling directly to Australia or New Zealand Vogt told iStart that the tools could be made available through Brocade, IBM or Teradata resellers.
