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Data breaches are increasing in pace and magnitude. Recently, health insurer Anthem disclosed that as many as 80m current and former policy holders had their personal information stolen, including names, medical IDs, Social Security numbers, addresses and salaries.

Much of this hijacked information can be used by hackers to steal victims' identities, take out loans, open new credit card accounts, etc. One Anthem customer said that fighting to protect his identity "could very well be a lifelong battle." The Anthem attack follows on the heels of the Sony breach, in which hackers gained access to the company's entire communications network, and before that came Target, Home Depot and Staples, to name just a few.

Companies today have more information than ever and, when properly protected, that data is vital to their success. But when compromised this data can pose a huge liability. This is why it's critical for companies to put in place security solutions that control and audit everyone who accesses their big data systems, not only because hackers are getting more sophisticated, but because the amount of data that's at risk is increasing constantly.

Look at the Hadoop market - a technology that is at the core of most enterprise-scale big data deployments. The global Hadoop market, powered by the demand for big data analytics, is forecast to grow from $2 billion in 2013 to $50.2 billion by 2020, according to Allied Market Research.

However, security concerns related to Hadoop adoption have threatened to slow the growth of big data technology. Why? Because Hadoop clusters often contain sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) and other highly regulated data, so auditing and controlling access to Hadoop and its underlying server infrastructure is critical to address both security and compliance requirements for regulations such as SOX, PCI and HIPAA. In addition, Hadoop deployments often introduce duplicate identity silos that can increase both risk and cost because they're not easily protected by an organisation's existing identity infrastructure.

Hadoop is a secure platform and the major vendors in the market, including Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR, do a good job in providing baseline protection for their customers. But, given the overwhelming need for bulletproof security today, there is an opportunity to extend what they and other providers offer.

You could compare it to the Windows desktop market. You would never say Windows desktop is not secure. And yet a healthy ecosystem of security vendors has developed around the market, providing a wide range of add-on features, such as anti-virus and anti-malware tools. In the case of big data and Hadoop, we are talking about mission-critical information - the keys to the kingdom - and that's why more and more customers are clamouring for additional big data security.

Centrify has built new features around privilege management to address customer concerns and further extend the security capabilities offered by Hadoop platform vendors. We allow an organisation to leverage its existing investment in Active Directory to audit and secure access across Hadoop clusters, nodes and services. This approach also simplifies and streamlines Hadoop deployments by allowing them to utilise existing identity infrastructure and skill-sets.

More and more companies are investing in Hadoop for big data. Consequently, more and more companies are looking to reduce their identity-related risks and improve their regulatory compliance. With Hadoop environments now storing most, if not all, of an organisation's critical data, a third-party solution that can track user activity back to an individual, thereby making data more secure, is absolutely vital, as is a solution that can report on who did what across Hadoop clusters, nodes and services.

Big data and Hadoop are the next great technology ecosystem. And new platforms inevitably give rise to add-on solutions-including security solutions-that enhance the overall value proposition. As a result we are likely to see a whole new set of vendors starting to build tools to support this environment.
More info: www.centrify.com