Hortonworks, a company that develops, distributes and supports a 100% open source Apache Hadoop data platform for enterprises, today announced that it has acquired data security company XA Secure for an undisclosed sum.
Founded in 2013, XA Secure provides an enterprise ready, cross-platform, security layer built from the ground up for Hadoop, that provides centralized capabilities around data security, authorization, auditing and governance.
Hortonworks said the acquisition would help accelerate its delivery of a “holistic and centralized approach” to Hadoop security, and that it would immediately begin incorporating the XA Secure technology into the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP).
Founded in 2011 by 24 engineers from the original Yahoo! Hadoop development and operations team, the Hortonworks Data Platform provides enterprises with a full suite of Hadoop capabilities, including data management, data access, data governance and integration, security, and operations.
“As part of meeting the broader enterprise IT requirements for a data lake architecture, Hortonworks set out to deliver a comprehensive, centralized approach to security administration and ensures consistent policy enforcement and audit for compliance across all workloads,” the company said in a statement. “Today’s alternative Hadoop security offerings only address a subset of these requirements. The acquisition of XA Secure provides Hortonworks with key technology and engineering expertise to quickly deliver on this industry direction for Hadoop security.”
“XA Secure will play an instrumental role in our company’s strategic vision for unlocking the potential of enterprise Hadoop,” said Rob Bearden, CEO of Hortonworks. “This move is consistent with our approach of delivering the enterprise capabilities that Hadoop users expect, completely in open source.”
“The teams at Hortonworks and XA Secure saw the unique market opportunity to lead and build the right set of security intelligence and management capabilities into the fabric of the Hortonworks Data Platform,” said Balaji Ganesan, founder and CEO of XA Secure. “We are thrilled to be joining Hortonworks to further execute our joint vision and lead the community-based initiative to provide enterprise-grade security within Hadoop as only an open community can.”
In addition to integrating XA Secure with its Data Platform, Hortonworks said it would transition the solution to an open Apache community project that woudl be available in late June 2014.
More information on the acquisition is available online.

For more than 10 years, Mike Lennon has been closely monitoring the threat landscape and analyzing trends in the National Security and enterprise cybersecurity space. In his role at SecurityWeek, he oversees the editorial direction of the publication and is the Director of several leading security industry conferences around the world.
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