Centrify Chief Product Officer of Bill Mann said with the release of Centrify Server Suite 2015, organisations can now leverage their existing Active Directory infrastructure to control access, manage privilege, address auditing requirements, and secure machine-to-machine communication with and across their Hadoop clusters, nodes and services.

Mann cited industry data from Allied Market Research showing that the global Hadoop market, powered by the rise in demand for big data analytics, is forecast to grow from $2 billion in 2013 to a staggering $50.2 billion by 2020.

He also cites a report by analyst firm Gartner that with the advent of major compliance mandates, “ongoing concerns about application and data security, it is apparent that sensitive data in Hadoop must be protected as well as sensitive data in traditional databases”.

Gartner also said: “With the advent of Hadoop 2.0 — and the expanded, real-time applications — the likelihood of sharing data among many users and applications rather than isolating each application, as was often the case in the first generation, increases security exposures.  Monitoring and auditing:  One aspect of ensuring that information isn't leaking, that changes to cluster are authorised, and that transformations and queries can be traced back to the originating, accountable users of applications and data”.

Mann said Centrify has built new features and compatibility enhancements in the areas of Kerberos network authentication, service account management, and Active Directory and Hadoop interoperability into Centrify Server Suite 2015 -  to address these concerns by Gartner - and extend the security capabilities provided by the Hadoop platform vendors to now offer robust privilege management for Hadoop environments.

According to Mann, this approach also simplifies and streamlines Hadoop deployments by allowing organisations to utilise existing identity management skillsets.  “In addition, to ensure compatibility as well as vendor collaboration when it comes to technical support, Centrify has built comprehensive integration guides and received product certifications from each of the major Hadoop providers,” Mann said.

“Over the past year or so we have had dozens of our enterprise customers begin to embark on their big data journey, and in doing so they saw immediate significant value in their Centrify identity management solution being applied to their new Hadoop deployments.

“These customers encouraged us to optimise our solution for Hadoop, which we gladly did, and by collaborating with them and the major Hadoop vendors, over the past year we have built in important Hadoop-specific enhancements which has culminated in the shipment of Centrify Server Suite 2015.”

The Centrify Server Suite is licensed on a per server basis and pricing in Australia starts at $400 per server and Hadoop customers can request a free evaluation of Centrify Server Suite by visiting here