Hortonworks Inc. is launching a new community initiative aimed at tightening the control around the growing amounts of information that organizations are feeding into their Hadoop clusters. The initiative builds on the newly public vendor’s existing efforts to provide much-needed governance capabilities for the data crunching platform.

Hortonworks most recently rolled out a certification course for analytic applications that implement the capabilities Apache Falcon, an engine for enforcing management policies originally developed at InMobi Inc. that recently became an official member of the Hadoop ecosystem. The software makes it possible to specify exactly what kind of operation to carry out on a particular piece of data in a certain situation, which is useful for preventing files from ending up somewhere somewhere don’t belong.

Falcon is a cornerstone component in the new Data Governance Initiative (DGI) that Hortonworks is pushing. The effort also encompasses Apache Ranger, an access management layer for Hadoop that the company obtained through the acquisition of XA Secure Inc. last May and released to the community under an open-source license shortly thereafter.

As with Falcon, Hortonworks is offering a certification for applications that leverage Ranger to regulate who accesses what. DGI will take that a big step further and see the creation of what the firm describes as an “extensible foundation” that will integrate with the two components as well as the traditional governance mechanisms that customers already has in the place.

The goal is to transform Hadoop from an isolated silo into a extension of an enterprise’s data architecture complete with full controls over the distribution and access of information. That’s a crucial requirement if the framework is to enter the enterprise mainstream.

Hortonworks’ initiative is an important step in Hadoop’s maturation process, said David Vellante, Chief Research Officer at The Wikibon Project. “The governance vacuum has been an impediment to realizing successful ROI on Hadoop projects,” he said. “Efforts like the Data Governance Initiative are useful steps to solving this problem. But the DGI is not a silver bullet. Many organizations don’t have their data governance act together with traditional workloads and adding big data to the mix compounds the problem.” He added that users still need to put internal discipline in place because “technology alone won’t solve the problem.”

Hortonworks is not going at it alone. DGI includes four other founding members, namely SAS Institute Inc., pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co., health insurance provider Aetna, Inc. and Target Corp., which is intimately familiar with the importance of proper data governance. More details about the initiative are expected to come out over the coming weeks.