Arcadia Data Introduces Security Solution for Big Data Visual Analytics

Arcadia Data has introduced a first-of-its-kind unified security and management solution for business intelligence (BI) that is native on Hadoop. Arcadia delivers security on data directly in Hadoop clusters, without sacrificing granular access control. Arcadia overcomes the complexities of extraction, data movement and fragmented permission models inherent to BI/analytics architectures that run from outside Hadoop.

Arcadia’s new security architecture is designed to extend selective control of granular data access from the platform straight through to the UI, for business users and not just for data scientists. Featuring direct integration with leading Hadoop-based authorization projects, it lets security-conscious enterprises, in sectors such as healthcare and finance, build broadly accessible data visualizations and still target specific role-based access policies to individual rows and columns. And thanks to Arcadia’s newly completed Cloudera Integrated Certification with Cloudera Manager, big data security is more streamlined and robust, making Hadoop the central control point for data security and access management across any users who wants to analyze big data.

“Market failure to offer data-centric audit and protection tools that cross the data silos is forcing CISOs to find pragmatic strategies to implement a data security governance policy,” according to Gartner analysts Brian Lowans, Principal Research Analyst and Earl Perkins, Research VP. “CISOs must address big data initiatives that will expose uncoordinated data security policies, operations and management responsibilities of security, and database and identity management teams.”

“Security is a key inflection point on the road to faster, broader Hadoop adoption,” said Tim Stevens, vice president, Business and Corporate Development at Cloudera. “Having Cloudera Integrated Certification with Cloudera Manager’s robust operations infrastructure, Apache Sentry’s multi-tenant authorization and access controls makes Arcadia Data a great example of high-quality integration with the Cloudera platform.”

Arcadia Enterprise is the only visual analytics and BI tool that is certified for deployment, management and security through Cloudera Manager. It affords IT organizations not only simplified deployment and operations for their Hadoop platform, but a more secure and convenient way to deliver on the value of Hadoop to the broadest range of business users.

Traditional BI and visualization tools rely on decentralized security models, which makes extracting and managing data from Hadoop complicated and vulnerable. Arcadia has developed centralized role based access control (RBAC) and its direct integration with Hadoop-native projects — Apache Sentry and Apache Ranger — leverages data permission models defined directly in the cluster, including discrete access control down to a single row or column in the data.

By delivering a security architecture converged from within Hadoop’s distributed processing framework, rather than imposed from without, Arcadia continues to deliver on its vision of on-cluster analytics by eliminating the complexities of redundant, overlapping security management inherent in BI stacks which rely on moving data off-cluster. The on-cluster approach ensures data architects, analysts and administrators in IT organizations get a faster, more cost-effective and safer path to value with their big data environments.

Legacy BI and visualization tools do not integrate with Hadoop-based authorization projects like Apache Sentry and Apache Ranger. Administrators are required to redefine security roles and privileges redundantly, once at the Hadoop tier and then again in the BI environment. As such, these multiple definitions need to be synchronized periodically and can lead to an error-prone security environment.

Arcadia’s RBAC can automatically import group membership from underlying directory sources based on Active Directory, Kerberos, LDAP or SAML, as well as role membership and privilege information from Apache Sentry. This integration with Hadoop services centralizes policy definition and removes redundancy for administrators. These roles can be used to grant fine-grained access to users for drill down capability, all from visuals and granular row- and column-level access in the raw data. Arcadia’s visualizations deliver inherently secure endpoint access because it can publish globally accessible browser-based visualizations inside and outside the corporate firewall.

Certified integration with Cloudera Manager provides secure plug-and-play deployment of Arcadia Enterprise into Cloudera Enterprise clusters. In addition to simplifying production operations, it provides audit transparency into any and all data access and analytics operations used for visualizations.