John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, broadcast live today from Hadoop Summit 2013 in San Jose, discussing the Hadoop Driven Business and the challenges arising from massive Hadoop adoption in terms of security and governance.

Their guest, Aaron Davies-Morris, Managing Director, Worldwide Professional Services with Intel, talked about his company’s current business strategy.

Vellante started the interview by asking Davies-Morris the reason behind Intel’s involvement with Hadoop distribution, the motivation for getting in the Hadoop market. Davies believes that Hadoop distribution increases chip sales, which is a good thing for their share-holders.

Explaining the company’s vision, he added: “As a company we have to look at how we diversify, how we grow, how we find more high-margin businesses.” That includes selling Hadoop distribution licences and services around Hadoop. The buzzword of the day is “software-defined data center”, but one thing is for sure: Hadoop is going to play a big part in this tsunami of data, warns Furrier.

Intel on open source

Intel is committed to open source, says Davies-Morris, but also to developing things around security and governance. Aaron Davies-Morris has a past of working for security software firm, McAfee, so security is something he knows, and something he’s interested in. “You cannot take a technology like Hadoop where you put all this information in and not put the right security control on,” he explains.

As Hadoop extends its reach, the sensitive data being processed by Hadoop must be protected, even though it might limit the overall performance. Project Rhino is an open source effort meant to enhance the existing data protection capabilities of the Hadoop ecosystem to address these challenges.

• The right partners are key in open source, Hadoop

“We think our partner strategy helps us meet large Enterprise needs,” says Davies-Morris. Intel’s goal is protecting Data Lakes, those Holy Grails that all hackers are interested in. “Having a layered defense of security is where you gotta go. The things that we’re doing around encryption, access control and auditing is one set of layers, but you also need other technologies around it, such as firewalls and IDS.”

“Intel’s focus, as a large organization, is the Enterprise provider of services and solutions,” Davies-Morris concludes. A part of this strategy is forging partnerships, including the recent tie-ups with Cray and Dell.

Watch the full interview below.