News

IBM Secures Hadoop in Analytics Cloud

• By David Ramel
• November 12, 2015

IBM has added end-to-end data protection to IBM Cloud Infrastructure for Analytics, its cloud-based offering designed to ease the significant investment burden required for implementing homegrown, on-premises Big Data solutions.

Called Secure Hadoop, the new feature protects data in motion -- moving to and from the cloud platform -- and data at rest, which is encrypted in the enterprise datacenter and remains protected when moved to IBM's SoftLayer object storage or the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). SoftLayer is IBM's cloud infrastructure service offering.

"Secure Hadoop facilitates more secure migration of data with encryption and patented cryptographic splitting, supports regulatory compliance using a government-certified encryption algorithm, and provides enterprise control over data access with encryption keys," the company said in a recent blog post.

IBM Cloud Infrastructure for Analytics provides SoftLayer-powered clusters on bare-metal infrastructure supported with pre-installed Big Data software. It works with BigInsights 3.0, BigInsights Quick Start Edition and InfoSphere Streams 3.2.1.

The BigInsights offerings provide 100 percent Apache Hadoop-based analytics featuring components such as HBase, Hive, Pig, Zookeeper, Oozie, Avro, Flume, Sqoop and more, combined with add-on enterprise features for visualization, security, administration and so on. InfoSphere streams is described as "an advanced analytic platform that allows user-developed applications to quickly ingest, analyze and correlate information as it arrives from thousands of data stream sources."

Along with encrypting raw data in motion or at rest, Secure Hadoop also can encrypt data that is generated from analytics processes running on Hadoop, IBM said. It also supports regulatory compliance via the government-certified FIPS 140-2 validated security algorithm, which includes AES-256 encryption, the company said, along with integrated key management.

"These innovative features of Secure Hadoop mean your data is: secured to and from the cloud, data in SoftLayer object storage is always secure, data resulting from Hadoop analytics process can be encrypted and exported to object store for secure transfer, and security keys are controlled by the client," IBM said. "The Secure Connector for Hadoop appliance uploads and downloads data directly to object storage, and there is no need to develop and maintain APIs nor is there a need to change existing infrastructure."