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September 30, 2013

Dataguise Locks Down $13M for Big Data Security

Isaac Lopez

Big data security company, Dataguise, announced today that they’ve added $13 million to their war chest in a Series B round of funding. The company, which offers an array of products for large scale databases, has been doubling down on their efforts to become the go-to vendor for Hadoop over the last two years.

The new investment round was led by Toba Capital, a group which says they focus on startups who “map the fissures and are quick to build on shaking ground.” Security for Hadoop is definitely an area that can be seen as such a metaphorical fissure due to such things as the distributed nature of the framework, the problems that traditional security approaches have when it comes to scaling past the terabyte level, and the “single point of failure” challenges wrapped into the NameNode associated with the HDFS file system.

Because Hadoop is still a baby in relative database terms, security is a issue that has hindered its uptake as an “enterprise” class production database system, leaving a wide-open field for the Hadoop community to fill. Dataguise is endeavoring to fill that gap with their DG for Hadoop security offering.

Dataguise offers a system that they say can pinpoint where a company has sensitive data – either on the way in, or after it has landed inside HDFS. Once the data is situated inside of HDFS, administrators are able to set policies to apply field level encryption to specific data, including credit card numbers, social security numbers, names, addresses, and others.

“The interest in Hadoop continues to rise, with the number of organizations testing the platform growing at a significant rate,” said Manmeet Singh, CEO, Dataguise in a previous release. “This is being driven in part by the fact that traditional databases are not appropriate to handle the overwhelming volumes of data used for analytics. This increasing trend in data growth is moving companies to deploy Hadoop to store, manage and cull through the data. However, this has created other challenges such as the risk of exposing sensitive data stored in these environments.”

The new round of funding, which the company says will be used for further product and channel development, brings the total that Dataguise has raised to $20.3 million. The company raised $7.3 million in Series A financing in March of 2011, including $3.25 million by Silicon Valley investor Herb Madan.

Joining the current funding round with Toba Capital is an unnamed “leading electronic conglomerate,” according to the company’s statement.

Related items:

Zettaset Puts Hadoop on Lockdown 

Cloudera Adds a Sentry to Their Stack 

Big Data Indexing: Addressing Business Risks Near You 

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