News

Cloudera Points Hadoop to Cybersecurity

• By David Ramel
• February 29, 2016

Cloudera Inc., a commercial vendor of Apache Hadoop-based software for Big Data analytics, has teamed up with other companies to tackle cybersecurity with the technology.

Cloudera today announced the Open Network Insight (ONI) project, described as "an open source, community-developed network data model that delivers visibility into security threats by providing advanced threat detection using Big Data analytics."

Originally published on GitHub by 01org -- the Intel Open Source Technology Center -- ONI code now has its own brand-new GitHub site.

"ONI seeks to tackle the dual challenges of unlocking innovation in cybersecurity while helping each vendor to avoid having to reinvent the same wheel again and again," said Cloudera's Sam Heywood in a blog post today. "ONI will eliminate issues related to vendor data models that create silos between solutions and make it difficult for customers to harness innovation from multiple vendors. In short ONI will accelerate solution development and simplify customer consumption of different vendor products."

To do that, the technology relies on machine learning (ML) to make suspicious network traffic stand out from normal, safe traffic. "The system uses a combination of Apache Spark and optimized C code to run scalable machine learning algorithms," says the "Open Network Insight Solution Guide" on GitHub under oni-docs (for version 9.0).

Because it's extensible, other vendors can improve and customize the software according to their own needs and create their own security applications running on top of Cloudera's Enterprise Data Hub (EDH) or other open alternative platforms.

Cloudera is partnering with companies such as CounterTack, Splunk, the aforementioned Intel, E8 Security and Securonix in its cybersecurity efforts.

Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly said in a statement today that ONI is meant to address the current cybersecurity landscape -- with different vendor data models and siloed solutions -- that requires each vendor to "reinvent the same wheel again and again."

"We are very excited about ONI and today's announcement is just the first step," Reilly said. "Building from ONI v1.0, Cloudera's goal is to foster development of open object models beyond network to include endpoint, and user/identity. Our cybersecurity-focused partners are leveraging ONI to accelerate their delivery of advanced solutions capitalizing on a pre-built open data model coupled with the powerful compute capabilities of Cloudera's enterprise data hub. Customers are benefiting from these common objects and can easily extend to adjacent use cases beyond cybersecurity: network operations, fraud, and user experience optimization to name just a few. A single source of data built on an open data model creates tremendous value for our customers."