As more Hadoop clusters move from pilot to production and enterprises continue to ingest growing amounts of key information about their operations and customers, the need to protect that data throughout the analytics lifecycle is becoming ever more urgent. But with traditional bolt-on solutions proving inadequate for defending against the threats facing organizations today, security has to be addressed from the ground up rather than treated as an afterthought.

That is what Hortonworks hopes to accomplish through the acquisition of XA Secure, an emerging startup that has been working to bring enterprise governance capabilities to Hadoop for the last year and a half. The terms of the deal, which was officially announced this morning and marks the vendor’s first purchase, were not disclosed.

The Fremont, California-based XA Secure was founded by Don Bosco Durai and Balaji Ganesan, two industry veterans who had each served in various leadership positions at several major tech companies prior to establishing the venture last January. The firm develops an access control layer for Hadoop that lets admins ensure users only view and make changes to data if they have been authorized to do so, simple but essential functionality for large organizations that not only have to deal with hackers but strict compliance requirements as well. Additionally, the software packs analytical capabilities for identifying policy inconsistencies and suspicious behavior.

A company called Zettaset offers similar features with its Orchestrator tool, which allows for centralized management of clusters on top of everything else and has recently been extended to support HBase. Yet unlike Orchestrator, XA Secure’s solution is embeddable, which fits perfectly with Hortonworks’ plans.

The Yahoo! spin-off said that it intends to bake the startup’s solution into its flagship Hadoop distribution and release the technology under an Apache license, a move aimed at leveling the playing field against rival Cloudera, which had released an open source authentication module for the batch processing framework back in July 2013.

“This fits with Hortonworks commitment to stick to core Hadoop and make it enterprise ready,” observes Wikibon analyst Jeff Kelly. “Security is critical when dealing with sensitive data, obviously. But it also indicates the open source community isn’t moving fast enough on security, in Hortonworks opinion, requiring it to buy a proprietary software vendor. That goes against Hortonworks’ core belief that open source community will always out-innovate proprietary vendors. Hortonworks said it will open source XA software, but it could be a challenge to create a ‘real’ community effort around it.”

The acquisition is a step in the right direction for Hortonworks, but it still has a lot of catching up to do on the security front. Cloudera’s Sentry project is months closer to graduating from incubation and it has the advantage of providing integration with other components in the Hadoop ecosystem, including the Hive data warehouse and the Impala structured query engine, which was also developed by the firm.

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