Zettaset Simplifies Big Data Encryption Management

2014 Big Data Outlook: Opportunities and Challenges

As compelling an IT opportunity as Big Data can be, it’s not without its challenges—not the least of which is securing all that data.

Looking to make it easier to apply encryption to distributions of Hadoop, Zettaset today announced it is making its encryption software available independently of the Orchestrator platform it created to manage Big Data security.

Zettaset CEO Jim Vogt says the Big Data encryption tools that Zettaset developed are compatible with Apache-based Hadoop distributions available from Hortonworks, Cloudera, MapR, Pivotal, Teradata, and IBM as well as Cassandra and Couchbase NoSQL databases. The tools can also now be accessed via third-party management consoles. That’s critical, says Vogt, because it allows IT organizations to apply encryption to Big Data at rest using the management tools in which they have already invested.

In addition, Vogt notes that Zettaset makes it easier to apply a consistent level of encryption across multiple instances of Big Data sources that are likely to proliferate across the enterprise.

The whole topic of Big Data security is even more nascent than the core technologies themselves. Most Big Data projects are moving forward at a pace that outstrips security concerns. But as organizations come to increasingly appreciate the business value of that data, it won’t be long before securing it becomes a major issue.

After all, if the internal IT organization isn’t going to pay attention to securing Big Data, there’s no end to the number of digital miscreants that would be more than happy to show them why they should.