Recently, Wikibon’s Chief Analyst, Dave Vellante, had a talk with Oren Falkowitz, CEO of big data startup Sqrrl, about the company’s development and work on the open source project Accumulo. Although there is no shortage of open source NoSQL projects, Falkowitz made a case for Accumulo and explained how its security features and scalability might afford it some room in the NoSQL landscape.

Sqrrl began developing Accmulo for the National Security Agency back in 2008 to answer some of the security concerns the NSA had when it came to storing and accessing big data. In 2011, the company released Accumulo under an open source license, and today it is a project of the Apache Software Foundation.

While talking with Vallante on The Cube, Falkowitz highlighted some of the unique features offered in Accumulo. Unlike other database systems, Accumulo provides users with the ability to manage security at the cell level. This cell-level security provides fine-grained controls, including an element that serves as a visibility field. This allows for individual cells to be authenticated against an individual user’s security attributes. In essence, security is baked into the core of Accumulo, rather than being an afterthought.

Accumulo is scalable, Falkowitz explained, because it gives companies the ability to coordinate data that they might have stored in a variety of packages, and bring them together for the purpose of better application cohesiveness. Moreover, the name of the company, Sqrrl, refers to the process of companies behaving like squirrels and storing their chunks of data away in various hidden places. With Accumulo, organizations can consolidate that data and make it more accessible.

For more on this development, you can view the full interview online.