by Angela Guess
Digital Journal recently published an article on the issue of avoiding data breaches in the age of Hadoop. The article notes, “It is clear that Hadoop is now mainstream and here to stay, being used to solve complex problems in industries such as Financial Services, Healthcare and Utilities among others. The use of Hadoop to manage the increased volume of data and number of users accessing the data, presents an entirely new set of [security] challenges. To address these challenges, organizations must balance the need to maintain a strong data governance model without sacrificing the business agility required to transform this data into high value information.”
The article goes on, “Hadoop security is still immature and if governance is ignored data could easily be compromised. In order to govern the data stored in Hadoop we first must understand what is contained in the stored data. Only then can we have a discussion about how it is secured, how it is used, and by whom. Data governance has always sought to address these issues but in the era of big data it is even more important – in the blink of an eye organizations can lose track of sensitive company and consumer information, and find themselves front page news. Beyond addressing security and compliance issues, when done right, data governance and stewardship can deliver a rich catalog of technical and business metadata. This creates an environment that allows data scientists, analysts and developers to better understand and discover data in Hadoop. Neglecting governance & stewardship may mean the vision of a data lake quickly turns into a data swamp.”
photo credit: Hadoop
