BlueTalon: Control and Visibility across Hadoop, RDBMS, and NoSQL

Enterprises of today rely on data more than ever before. And it is crucial that they define the access that the users have to the enterprise data to mitigate cybersecurity risks. Did you know that the majority of the cyber attacks these days happen by stealing user credentials to access confidential information? As many as 71% of the corporate employees today have reported having access to information that they actually shouldn’t. This problem though is only compounding with the broader adoption of Hadoop, Spark and other big data technologies.

Hence, it is important that enterprises have the oversight on the great amounts of the sensitive data that they store. BlueTalon, a company based out of California, keeps enterprises in control of their data by giving the users the access they need but not a byte more.

The amount of data that the companies collect to run their businesses has been on the rise since the turn of this decade. And due to this, innovative database technologies such as Hadoop and NoSQL emerged to provide enterprises with an economically viable means to collect massive amounts of structured and unstructured information. The idea for the company spurred out of a number of converging tech trends like these that drove the need for more data-centric security as the cyber attacks were becoming bigger and more damaging. The company was founded in 2013 and is now a leading provider of data-centric security for the next generation data platforms. The company, since its inception, has kept enterprises in control of their data allowing them to give users access to the data they need.

The BlueTalon Policy Engine has been the company’s best product to date and is deployed by many companies. The product has acted as a bridge between many users, the applications they use and the enterprise repositories which are used to provide authorization. The BlueTalon Policy Engine has been applied widely for fine-grained control over data through data masking and stealth analytics.

BlueTalon today has a huge role to play in the enterprise scene as it has established partnerships with the large technology companies. These partnerships have spanned across industries and are leveraged by many big data projects where security is no more a big issue. Among its biggest partners are the likes of Dell EMC, HortonWorks, Cloudera, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Teradata.

CEO’s Corner

Eric W. Tilenius, CEO

A seasoned tech executive, he has led successive startups into becoming publicly traded companies. This list includes the likes of Answers.com and Netcentives. He is a security pioneer who has helped clients such as VISA, American Express, AOL, and American Airlines implement secure technology solutions. He has played the role of a leader at popular companies like Oracle, Intuit, Zynga, Scale Venture Partners, Mayfield, and Bain. He holds an MBA from Stanford, and an AB, Summa Cum Laude, from Princeton.

Working with Dell EMC

Back in 2016, Dell EMC was looking for a data security and governance partner for its then newly announced Dell EMC Analytic Insights Module. The Analytics Module was introduced to integrate multiple data stores – Hadoop, NoSQL and RDBMS – with the tools to simplify end-to-end data governance and data access auditing. And BlueTalon was chosen as a partner by the IT giant to bring its unified access controls, security policies, and auditing capabilities to augment the module.

While announcing the partnership, Ted Bardasz, Dell EMC’s Senior Director, Product Management said: “We are excited to integrate BlueTalon into Analytic Insights Module, as it provides market-leading data security capabilities with best-in-class performance.” The partnership between the companies was extended in the second half of 2017, when Dell EMC announced that BlueTalon’s Unified Data Access Control^TM will be the cornerstone for security in its Elastic Data Platform.

Unified Data Access Control for Teradata

The deployments of Hadoop in the beginning stages are often done without a consideration for access control, auditing and data protection requirements. This can though expose critical data to attacks and may attract potential privacy compliance violations and fines. To tackle these challenges, Teradata, the world’s market leader in data analytics, decided to partner up with BlueTalon.

Teradata has benefitted in many ways ever since it entered into a partnership with BlueTalon in 2016. BlueTalon has enabled Teradata’s customers to deploy Hadoop and their other UDA technologies without increasing risk or adding complexity to their access controls. Onboarding Bluetalon has also benefited the customers of the company to lower the operational security costs.

 “BlueTalon lets you define the most comprehensive and thorough set of policies that support precise provisioning and empower business users and developers to gain access to the data they need, not a byte more.”

“BlueTalon delivers the best data control technology for today’s data challenge and keeps you in control of your data.”

“By enforcing consistent policies with BlueTalon, you can ensure that users have access to all the data they need to drive key decisions without compromising compliance or security.”