As data governance methods grow in sophistication, the security needs of those processes are developing to match. For effective approaches by the security side of the data handlers, that data needs to be presented in an intelligible fashion, which is exactly where some companies are finding their niche.

At this year’s BigDataNYC event, Tendü Yoğurtçu, GM of Big Data at Syncsort, Inc., met with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to discuss how Syncsort is working to simplify the handling of data for its clients and the future applications opened up by doing so.

Ease of adoption

Yoğurtçu began by outlining what had drawn Syncsort to its current interest. “Data governance is a very important area of focus for us this year. Half of our Hadoop customers and Big Data customers are already in production, and these are enterprise companies, like financial services, insurance, healthcare, where regulatory compliance is very critical,” she said. “So we started focusing in this area, complementing what the Hadoop vendors are also doing.”

Yoğurtçu also shared that while Syncsort is working toward further integration with various services and utilities, the enabling of customers to continue utilizing their homebrewed systems was a prime concern for them. “What we announced last week is making data governance and audits and taking metadata lineage just simpler and more flexible for our customers and for organizations,” she said.

“What that means is that most of the financial services [and others] already have custom in-house metadata management frameworks. They are looking forward to transition into Hadoop-based metadata management frameworks; however, this comes with a certain adoption speed,” she continued. “So we wanted to give them flexibility by publishing the metadata lineage cross-platform, and in just an open text form that anybody can use with in-house … tools.”

Knowing the data

For Syncsort, the data-handling has benefits beyond the immediate analysis. “We also have the knowledge of data as we are accessing all enterprise data,” Yoğurtçu said. “We have that understanding of where the data is originating, what’s happening to it as it lands in the enterprise data-lake or data-hub, and the analytics happen. So we publish that in an open format in addition to our integration.”

Yoğurtçu also noted the need to render this data in forms that were easy to understand for non-human intelligence as well. “With Big Data, these data-silos, people or organizations are trying to really break the silos of data and have all of the enterprise data available for advanced analytics. Advanced analytics, machine learning, all require data to be accessible to them. Data has to be brought to them.”

Data security

Yoğurtçu continued: “So while making that happen, security becomes a challenge. Data governance becomes a challenge. … I think that security governance and also simplifying this environment, and simplifying it — whether the data is in motion or in batch, whether the data is on-premise or in the cloud, having a single interface and single tool for batch and streaming, on-premise and in the cloud, and both for legacy data and mainframe data and new data sources — is really critical.”

Yoğurtçu summed up Syncsort’s current business drive: “Bridging the gap between the mainframes and the Big Data analytics and advanced analytics is where we are really positioning ourselves and bringing value to our customers.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of BigDataNYC 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE