WANdisco is expanding its already formidable software configuration management (SCM) portfolio with a new access control solution for Subversion and Git. The offering is geared towards enterprise customers that have to deal with both systems being used by their developers, a scenario that until now left IT departments with no choice but to implement two separate editions of the same product, or worse, utilize completely different tools.

This approach not only forces CIOs to spend more than necessary on licenses but also makes it harder for admins to  consistently enforce policies, increasing the risk of human error and making intellectual property more vulnerable to theft. WANdisco Access Control Plus solves these challenges in one fell swoop with a unified dashboard that ensures code is protected regardless of the source control software used.

Subversion, commonly known as SVN, stores revisions in a central repository that is relatively simple to maintain and secure, which is why organizations tend to prefer it over Git, a distributed system that leverages peer-to-peer networking for sharing patches. Both are open source, which WANdisco CEO David Richards considers an advantage.

“Open source has a habit of being highly disruptive in the market to a large degree, and it shifts and makes changes at 100 miles an hour, it’s a very efficient distribution mechanism. Kinda overnight before you even realize it, open source finds its way into the fabric of organizations’ infrastructure,” Richards detailed in an interview on theCUBE at SiliconANGLE’s Big Data NYC event last October.

WANdisco has taken an active role in the open source community, becoming an official sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation in February 2011 and acquiring AltoStor for $5.1 million two years later. The deal earned the company a foothold in the Big Data space, where it’s now carving out a niche of its own with continuous availability of solutions for Hadoop. Richards believes openness is one of the main drivers behind the rapid adoption of the batch processing framework.

“Techies train themselves on how to use it, [and] it goes very quickly to the heart of enterprise. And unlike proprietary technology, which weaves its way in very very gradually, open source kind of happens,” Richards said. But open technology alone oftentimes doesn’t cut it for large organizations, as is the case with Hadoop as well as SVN and Git. WANdisco is filling the gaps in all three.

Access Control Plus packs a comprehensive set of capabilities for logging repository activity, enabling admins to monitor which users accessed what and when and delegate configuration authority to team leaders. The platform also includes integrated alerting and automatically assigns developers to the Subversion and Git teams that correspond to their authentication server groups. WANdisco says that these features enable organizations to meet compliance requirements without having to manually collect data for audits, a time consuming process with an unavoidable margin of error.

Image source WANdisco