BlueTalon, provider of unmatched data entitlement solutions for Hadoop, today announced the BlueTalon Policy Engine. The technology ushers in a new era of truly secure Hadoop clusters by enforcing granular data-centric access policies across the entire organization and for entire clusters. BlueTalon also announced $5 million in follow-on venture capital funding. Signia Venture Partners, Biosys Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Stanford-StartX Fund, Divergent Ventures, and Berggruen Holdings joined existing investor Data Collective, which also participated in the financing.

BlueTalon is announcing both its ground-breaking new product and its new funding today at Strata + Hadoop World, where BlueTalon has been selected in a competitive process as one of the dozen most game-changing big data startups that will be honored through the conference’s Startup Showcase. Strata + Hadoop World takes place February 17-20 at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, CA. BlueTalon is also exhibiting at Strata + Hadoop World in the Innovator’s Pavilion, booth P9.

In today’s data-driven economy, Hadoop is increasingly being implemented as the data processing solution of choice. Forrester coined the term “Hadooponomics” to reflect Hadoop’s power at linearly scaling both data storage and data processing. However, despite Hadoop’s dramatic cost savings, flexibility and scalability, true enterprise-scale adoption has been hindered by Hadoop’s paucity of data entitlement, data security and regulatory compliance solutions. Until now.

The BlueTalon Policy Engine empowers enterprises with fine-grained data access control and provisioning. Compared to current coarse-grained data access approaches that either blindly permit full data access or crudely block access entirely, BlueTalon allows for real-time authorization on a row, column and cell level – at run-time for each query. BlueTalon’s unique capabilities are ideally suited for any organization in which different people or departments have different authorizations to view the same data sets, including almost every global company in a regulated industry. For example, a stockbroker might be able to see sensitive data for his or her clients, but not for clients of another broker. Or the accounting department might be able to view financial information in customer records, while marketing can use – but not see – purchase information to figure out how to better target new customers.

“The value and growth of Hadoop is being driven by its economies of scale, but it now requires enterprise-scale entitlement and fine-grained access security to maintain this growth, extend its value and deliver on its potential,” said Eric Tilenius, CEO of BlueTalon. “BlueTalon’s Policy Engine is the missing link for delivering enterprise Hadoop in production environments for even the most sensitive data. The launch of this breakthrough technology, funding from a who’s who of investors, and the recognition at Strata + Hadoop World as a company to watch, are all major milestones for our company and the Hadoop market.”

The BlueTalon Policy Engine integrates with existing enterprise infrastructures to:

  • Safeguard data by managing secure data access across different Hadoop access methods. BlueTalon has been built to consistently apply business policy across multiple Enforcement Points, enabling the Policy Engine to protect a wide range of access methods including Hive, Impala, JDBC, ODBC, and – coming at the end of Q2 – HDFS enforcement for bullet-proof Hadoop cluster protection.
  • Provision data access by enabling role and purpose-based data access policies to be customized and managed from a single, easy-to-use graphical user interface.
  • Enforce data access rules in real-time to ensure operational security as well as regulatory compliance. In addition, BlueTalon is the only Hadoop security and policy enforcement system to provide on-the-fly masking of sensitive data.
  • Audit data access to ensure both compliance and security. BlueTalon provides full visibility of both successful and denied data access, enabling suspicious patterns to be quickly spotted before significant data leakage occurs.

“The transition of enterprise data from proprietary and expensive databases to Hadoop clusters is inevitable and already happening at a rapid pace,” said Ed Cluss, managing director at Signia Venture Partners. “We invested in BlueTalon because no other company can ignite the Hadoop marketplace with an ideal data access control solution that makes Hadoop clusters as secure as any enterprise data warehouse on the market.”

“BlueTalon eliminates a major roadblock in the Hadoop ecosystem by making enterprise data on Hadoop as safe – or safer – than that in traditional data warehouses. BlueTalon’s performance, capabilities, and scalability are exceptional,” said Matt Ocko, Managing Partner at Data Collective. “We believe that BlueTalon is the key to unlock widespread Hadoop adoption in giant but regulated global industries such as finance and healthcare, and we are excited to help Eric and his team capitalize on this enormous opportunity.”

More information on the BlueTalon Policy Engine is available at http://bluetalon.com/product/