Hadoop Earns Its Enterprise Stripes

Atlas Data Governance Delivers "Last Mile"

At Attivio, we work with some of the world's largest banks and manufacturing companies. As they invest more in Hadoop, they also require more from it. They recognize its value in dealing with extremely large and diverse data sets. But they're also looking for enterprise features, and data governance is often at the top of the list.

When we and a number of our customers joined Atlas—the Hortonworks data governance initiative—we brought our unique capabilities around data discovery and dealing with unstructured data. Many companies have chosen Hadoop as their new data platform and need a way to integrate their legacy data sources. We can connect the Hadoop ecosystem with external legacy systems.

This turns out to be very helpful when it comes to data governance. Attivio is one of the first products to integrate with Atlas. We're using our data discovery expertise and understanding the origins of data to help write additional metadata that improves the performance of the Atlas governance model and automates governance in ways that weren't possible before.

A Central Metadata Repository

With these improved capabilities, Atlas can function as a central metadata repository. It can even hold metadata external to Hadoop, making it a metadata and governance "clearinghouse" for all of an organization's data. This is a very significant step forward for Hortonworks and Hadoop as it matures into an enterprise technology, respected and relied upon like Linux or Windows.

Especially for companies that operate in regulated industries, the value of trusted governance can't be underestimated. For example, many large financial institutions adopted Hadoop early on out of sheer necessity, in spite of its immaturity on the governance front. The volume of data they capture is extreme, so they need to run analytics at massive scale. Nevertheless, many of their primary analytic use cases such as know-your-customer, e-surveillance, and anti-money laundering carry with them substantial information governance and regulatory compliance restrictions.

With Atlas in place, Hortonworks now delivers analytical power coupled with robust governance, which makes it an enterprise-level solution for Big Data.

Hadoop Summit, San Jose, June 28-30