Hortonworks recently acquired the data security company XA Secure to help the organization in providing comprehensive security to Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP).
Tim Hall, Vice President of Product Management at Hortonworks, mentioned with this acquisition, HDP and Hadoop Community will benefit in getting central security administration. Security features would be available across all Hadoop workloads from batch, interactive SQL and real–time.
He mentioned XA Secure team has built and implemented various security products with the perspective of enterprise in mind and pointed out the HDP near-term security strategy.
In the near-term, we will offer our customers support for HDP Security which includes:
- simplified central administration of Hadoop security policies,
- granular access control enforcement across for HDFS, Hive, and HBase,
- universal security audit tracking, and
- compliance conformance controls.
He compared the security features that were present earlier in HDP with those that will be introduced with XA Secure integration in HDP. XA Secure comprehensive approach will strengthen administration, authorization and auditing in HDP. Earlier there was no administration in HDP which is now going to be centrally administered. Now after acquisition, authorization and audit would be comprehensive instead of fragmented across components.
Tim pointed out that Hortonworks will be contributing the capabilities developed by XA Secure to the Apache Software Foundation as a new project for continued community development.
Tim mentioned with the wider adoption of HDP across number of organizations there is a need for broader set of capabilities for enterprise Hadoop beyond basic data management and data access needs. Security capability for enterprise Hadoop is one of the major desired features among others. Merv Adrian, from Gartner team mentioned that people are not focusing on security for Hadoop.
“Not looking” at security and privacy seems to be the posture of people implementing Hadoop, based on recent data Gartner has collected. This is troubling, and paradoxical. In an era when the privacy of data, from government surveillance to medical record-keeping to “creepy” marketing initiatives and password breaches, has been in the news regularly, it is hard to understand why professionals implementing Hadoop are not paying attention.
Hortonworks and XA Secure are working collaboratively on the open roadmap and HDP Security technology is going to be available in late June 2014. Josh Olson of Precognx stated that it will add more security capabilities to Hadoop.
We’ve been advocating for a long time that the heightened security required in today’s corporations is growing… Hortonworks HDP adoption is growing… the combination is fantastic and we are pleased to see more capabilities in this area helping us deliver more value for our clients!
Other enterprise Hadoop providers like Cloudera, MapR and Intel are also working on the Hadoop security capabilities. The security capability in Cloudera and MapR technologies is based on the Kerberos protocol. Intel has introduced Expressway API Manager for improving the Hadoop security and reliability model which requires no changes in Hadoop distribution.
Hortonworks is organizing a webinar on 24th June on “Hadoop Security with XA Secure and Hortonworks Data Platform” which will include the comprehensive set of Hadoop Security requirements and demonstrate how HDP can address them.