Tom Reilly’s Cloudera is doubling down on Big Data security in a push to make Hadoop more viable for powering mission-critical enterprise workloads. Moving closer toward this goal, the company recently announced that it is adding support for Accumulo, an open source database that offers fine-grained access control to structured and unstructured information.

Originally developed by the NSA, Apache Accumulo lets admins limit user access on the server, database, table and view levels across Hive and Cloudera’s Impala, a real time querying tool for Hadoop. The platform is also compatible with Zookeeper, Thrift and Pig, and simplifies data management by enabling users to modify key-value pairs on the fly.

Cloudera said that it will be “devoting significant internal engineering resources to speed Accumulo’s development” and integrate the platform into its analytics portfolio.

“Accumulo was purpose-built to address the very specific security needs of the Federal government and US intelligence communities, making it a natural and highly complementary extension to our efforts to deliver military-grade security for Hadoop,” commented Tom Reilly, a former ArcSight executive who took over as the the chief executive officer of Cloudera in June. “We are decisively all-in on Accumulo and will be working closely with our partners and customers worldwide to further evolve the platform and increase its functionality, performance and reliability, while ensuring tight integration with our product suite.”

The integration with Accumulo bolsters Cloudera’s homegrown Sentry solution, an open source authorization tool aimed at Hadoop users in regulated industries such as healthcare and finance. Unveiled in July, the software provides role-based based access controls for large-scale HDFS clusters that historically been difficult to secure and manage.

Cloudera pegs Sentry as a first-of-its-kind solution that offers “unprecedented control” over enterprise-scale Big Data environments.