Big data pioneer Cloudera Inc. is trying to ease the burden for companies building complex applications that leverage new technologies such as machine learning. To do so, today it added a new service called the Shared Data Experience to its Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub platform.

SDX, as the service is called, is a suite of tools the company said can help customers to build and run “high-value, multi-function analytics” applications in both on-premises and cloud environments.

Cloudera reckons this is an important addition to its product armory. It pointed out that many of its customers’ most pressing executive-level initiatives – which it said are things such as cybersecurity, connecting products and services, and increasing the lifetime value of customers – can only be achieved by implementing new and complex applications that work in tandem with others and perform multiple tasks.

For example, Cloudera pointed to modern Internet of Things applications, which often need to ingest and then carry out analytics and machine learning on batch and streaming data. This is difficult because such disparate data processes were never designed to converge in this way, and the challenge for customers is to unify these complex workflows, Cloudera said.

A second problem is that cloud-based clusters don’t generally share their data or metadata, so in effect they become “de facto silos” that get in the way of deeper data analytics.

Cloudera said SDX solves those problems by applying shared governance, security, management, ingest and data catalog capabilities to these applications. With the new tools, customers can easily create, govern and secure this new breed of apps in order to address pressing business initiatives.

One of Cloudera SDX’s key components is its shared data catalog, which helps to put data in context and make it more widely available. It also allows users to establish consistent security, governance and management functions for their apps. In addition, the shared data catalog also provides company employees with self-service access to business data. Finally, it enables users to quickly find and understand the context of data, enabling self-service applications and providing inviolable audit and lineage functionality.

“Companies often cite security, governance, and complexity among their primary reasons for not moving their operational workloads to cloud,” said Tony Baer, a principal analyst at Ovum. “Cloudera has planted its stake in the ground by building in the security and data governance features to make companies confident in standing up their big data workloads in production. Cloudera SDX builds on the company’s IP with a shared data experience across cloud and on-premises environments.”

Cloudera said SDX is available now for customers with Cloudera Data Science & Engineering, Analytic DB, Operational DB and Enterprise Data Hub licenses.

Image: Cloudera