The sheer amount of data stored in Hadoop clusters makes them a natural target for hackers, but organizations don’t have too many good options to achieve the level of security needed to rise up to the threat. BlueTalon Inc. hopes to change that with a new iteration of its policy enforcement engine that implements privacy measures directly into the analytics framework.

That means the restrictions that an administrator sets in the software automatically apply to every single application that tries to access the Hadoop File System. BlueTalon thus kills two birds with one stone, saving customers the hassle of individually implementing security controls in every workload that uses data from the framework while allowing for more consistent enforcement.

In the large organizations where the majority of production-grade Hadoop clusters are found, that efficiency gain is multiplied by all the dozens of different departmental processes that depend on the platform. And that’s not to mention the saved overhead from not having to keep that many application-specific privacy controls up-to-date as operational requirements evolve.

The BlueTalon Policy Engine complements the centralized user authentication capabilities that are already available for Hadoop in the open-source Apache Range project with masking features that can be used to replace sensitive information with a structurally-similar placeholder. That allows users to keep records protected without changing the dataset in a way that requires complicated operational adjustments.

Coupled with the filtering functionality included in the update for organizations seeking an added level of security, that makes BlueTalon’s software a formidable alternative to Dataguise Inc.’s more established DgSecure. Both vendors are showing off their wares at the Strata + Hadoop World 2015 conference in New York this week, where SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE is streaming live from the show floor.

Image via BlueTalon