Open standards are a critical consideration when evaluating data security platforms. Why should you care? A data security platform is an enterprise solution that will likely span your entire data ecosystem, touching and requiring integration with many different systems, unlike standalone or point solutions. When dealing with enterprise systems, standards matter.

What critical component of a data security platform universally ranks at the top of the list? Apache Ranger is the imperative component to enable, monitor, and manage data access in an open-source framework. It is widely used by over 3,000 organizations around the world, typically across Apache Hadoop, Hive, HBase, and other Apache components. Ranger is also used to manage access control for several of the top modern cloud-based data solutions. Well known and well used, Ranger is the defacto open standard.

A unified data security platform delivers a fully supported SaaS solution that greatly extends the functionality, breadth of capabilities, and data source and ecosystem integrations of open-source Apache Ranger. There are five primary reasons why a unified data security platform based on Apache Ranger is important:

1. Apache Ranger is proven.
2. Tighter native integration.
3. Abundance of available skills.
4. Extensible.
5. Prevents vendor lock-in.

The necessity of these components becomes more critical as a company requires an increasingly enterprise-capable solution.

An enterprise solution needs to be built on an established framework, one which has been used by thousands of organizations, proven across myriad conditions and with different requirements that demonstrate that the framework is highly performant and scalable. Often minimized or overlooked, performance and scalability for enterprise solutions are hard to demonstrate in a proof of concept. Performance and scalability must receive sufficient credence. A solution built on a strong, proven foundation greatly reduces the risk of downstream issues as you scale up and out of your solution.

Tight native integrations are also important, both for ease of integration as well as to ensure performance. A unified data security platform built on the same open standards as the source system provides tight native integration.

Finding and training skilled data administrators and engineers is no small task. Having to find and train people on proprietary systems is even harder. It’s much easier when a solution is based on widely used open standards. In this case, with open standards, it’s about more than just fungible and abundant resources. Open standards feature a skill set technical resources are more likely to adopt, since those skills will likely be in greater demand than a proprietary-system-based skill.

Open-standards solutions tend to be more extensible than proprietary solutions, since they are backed by a community of contributors who can build and share additional functionality and source connectors. These items can then be faster and more easily vetted, tested, integrated, and available to customers.

Finally, open standards help avoid vendor lock-in, from the point of view of both source integration and your data security platform provider. From the data source point of view, it is much easier to migrate data security from one source vendor to another when they are based on the same open standard. This makes a lift and shift or near-lift and shift approach, with respect to your data security policies, much more realistic and attainable. And the same argument can be made relative to your data security platform provider.

As you compile all your requirements for your enterprise data security, data governance, and data access solution, make sure “open-standards based” is a primary element in your evaluation criteria.

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