Hortonworks's first acquisition gave Hadoop security a good head start.

As more and more Hadoop clusters are transformed from experimental projects to production, companies begin to incorporate critical information related to their operations and customer situations, which makes it increasingly imperative to enforce data protection in the analysis cycle. But it turns out that the traditional add-on solution is not enough to withstand the real threats facing companies today, and that security must be unremittingly from the start, and should not be seen as an afterthought in the past.

And that's exactly what Hortonworks hopes to achieve with the acquisition of Xa secure, a start-up that has been committed to bringing enterprise-level governance to Hadoop for the past 1.5 years. The deal, which was officially announced this morning, is also the first acquisition by Hortonworks since its inception, but its details have not yet been disclosed.

The California State Fremont's XA secure company was co-founded last month by Don Bsco Durai and Balaji Ganesan, two veterans of the technology industry who had previously held important positions in several mainstream technology companies. The young company wants to develop an access control layer for Hadoop to help administrators ensure that users can only view and modify content that matches their permissions. While this may not sound difficult, it is absolutely remarkable for large companies, who, after all, have to deal with the challenges posed by compliance reviews, with the exception of ubiquitous hackers. In addition, the XA secure packages are analytical enough to identify activities that do not conform to the policy or are abnormal.

A company called Zettaset also provides similar functionality in its orchestrator tools, which can take up to a high point for cluster management in a centralized manner and actually support hbase in recent expansions. Unlike orchestrator, however, the solution with XA secure has an embeddable feature that fits well with Hortonworks's predetermined plan.

As an independent company split by Yahoo, Hortonworks said it plans to incorporate the emerging company's solution into its flagship Hadoop release and launch it under Apache License, aiming to achieve an equal confrontation platform with rival Cloudera. The latter published an open source validation module for the batch framework in July 2013.

"It's all in line with Hortonworks's commitment to sticking to core Hadoop and getting it ready for the business environment," Wikibon analyst Jeff Kelly said. "In the process of processing sensitive data, security is clearly an important factor that cannot be overlooked." However, in the current state of view, the open source community in the security efforts and progress seems not ideal. In view of this, Hortonworks has made its own choice-to acquire a proprietary software supplier. This seems to contradict Hortonworks's long-standing belief that the open source community must always be ahead of proprietary providers at the innovation level. Hortonworks says it will be open source for XA software, but there are many challenges to building a ' real ' community as a core. ”

The acquisition marks an important step in the Hortonworks to the right path, but there are still a lot of unfinished business to be done in security matters. After all, competitor Cloudera's Sentry project will be officially released in a few months, and they are also taking advantage of integrating other components with the Hadoop ecosystem, This includes the Hive Data Warehouse and the Impala Structured Query engine (Impala is also developed by Cloudera).