Gazzang buy gives end-to-end encryption for Cloudera Hadoop

IDG News Service - Cloudera will incorporate technology from its acquisition of encryption software provider Gazzang into Apache Hadoop so that industries with stringent security regulations can use the big-data processing platform.

Gazzang's technology will permit Hadoop use by organizations that have legal requirements to encrypt data across the entire system, said Mike Olson, Cloudera chief strategy officer. Terms of the acquisition, announced Tuesday, were not disclosed.

Regulations such as the health care industry's Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, retail's Payment Card Industry and Europe's Data Protection Directive, all require end-to-end encryption.

"Those folks need very strong security guarantees," Olson said.

Cloudera has already made Gazzang's encryption and key management software available for download to Cloudera customers and is folding the technology into the Cloudera Enterprise distribution.

Cloudera Enterprise already comes with many encryption capabilities -- for instance, data stored on the HDFS (Hadoop File System) can be encrypted.

But other parts of Hadoop do not have built-in encryption. Data that comes into the system from one of the streaming engines, such as Apache Sqoop, is not encrypted. Nor is metadata, the catalog data that describes the data being stored. Configuration information about a Hadoop cluster is not routinely encrypted either.

"There are pockets of data that need to be encrypted. Gazzang does that across the platform," Olson said.

Gazzang also provides a central, industrial-strength, registry for the keys used to encrypt and decrypt data.

"No vendor in the Hadoop space right now offers integrated security encryption and key management for the platform," Olson said.

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Gazzang buy gives end-to-end encryption for Cloudera Hadoop