As the options for enterprises to store and manage their data continue to diversify, along with the proprietary aspects of the companies providing those options, some players in the Big Data game are finding that the best move is to make themselves able to operate in any field.

At the BigDataNYC 2016  conference, Scott Gnau, CTO of Hortonworks Inc., joined Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Peter Burris (@plburris), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about changes in the storage and network game tied to the growing usage of clouds, as well as how Hortonworks is trying to make itself available to all users.

Fitting into the ecosystem

An early point of discussion touched on the value of the ecosystem, and the need for flexible accessibility. As Gnau explained it, “In today’s world of Big Data … it’s really about being able to fit into a converged ecosystem, and not monolithic systems.”

Gnau also spoke about Hortonworks’ business dealings with Microsoft to improve user options and utilities, including a focus on making it easier for “allowing data-science clusters to be spun up in the cloud.”

Gnau moved on to address the idea of implementing user personas on clouded data platforms as a means of narrowing down utilities to just what will actually be used, thereby saving on cloud data usage and improving value.

Security on the go

“The key thing is there are applications that can be tested against the whole of the data very economically,” Gnau said, before exploring how Hortonworks feels it’s important to be accessible and consistent regardless of how customers choose to deploy.

“I believe that [customers] will have data in multiple cloud instances,” he said, touching on the likelihood that, for many customers, the data will basically be left wherever it’s put by hired data-management services. In such cases, he added, “You want to play [data] where it lies,” making it all the more important for a cross-deployment solutions set to be available.

To enhance that sense of interoperability, Hortonworks is also developing tag-based and role-based security. In Gnau’s given example of accessing the same data from different countries while traveling, different regulations and user-end levels of security necessitate an abstracted but personalized means of retaining the same level of functionality. “Being able to tie that security to other metadata tagging … being able to do tag-based metadata security … this is a really big deal,” Gnau stated.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE