Note: this is a guest post by Michael Rothschild of Vormetric.

The only constant in life is change, and those of us in technology know this to be true. Technologies that were experiments just five years ago are now de-facto standards. To stay competitive, organizations need to keep up with the latest business-tech trends and adapt their infrastructure accordingly.

Today, C-Suites seek competitive advantage through big data. But, to fully benefit, organizations need to draw on various forms of data:

  • Structured data in a range of heterogeneous applications and databases
  • Unstructured data that comes in an increasing number of file types.

Doing this frequently requires migration from a relational database management schema structure (RDBMS) to a NoSQL Big data solution like Couchbase.

Migration from RDMBS to NoSQL, or, for that matter, any data migration, requires careful planning and sizing to ensure a smooth transition. Couchbase 4.5 makes the transition from relational to NoSQL easier than ever, with features like query editing and auto schema discovery with the Query Workbench, high-speed backup/restore. Security has to be part of this as well.

Security is an ever-changing battlefield. Rules of engagement and organizational “terrain” — always in flux — require a vigilant eye for potential data vulnerabilities. Any migration requires an analysis of your defensive and offensive positions to make sure your data are protected from theft.  Couchbase 4.5 also added several important security features such as X.509 Certificates, and Role-based access control.

With the combined Couchbase and Vormetric solution, you can secure your data resources to address security policies and compliance mandates and to safekeep your organization’s reputation (and your career). This can only be accomplished through data encryption with integrated key management, privileged user access policies and security intelligence.

While some vendors offer big data encryption capabilities, these offerings only secure specific big data nodes, not the original data sources that feed into the big data environment or the analytics that come out of the environment. Further, these big data encryption offerings don’t secure all the log files and configuration information associated with the big data environment itself.

Because of these disparate approaches to big data security, IT teams have to contend with fragmented key and policy management. This adds administrative effort, while making it difficult to apply standards consistently. Further, these point approaches tend to degrade performance, which is a big concern in processing-intensive big data environments.

Vormetric & Couchbase offer a combined solution that empowers you to take advantage of all of the benefits of big data — while also maximizing the security and compliance needs of your sensitive data. In addition to transparent encryption, this unified solution offers:

  • Granular privileged-user-access controls
  • Tokenization with dynamic masking, which can enhance system efficiency
  • Security intelligence
  • Full scalability

Organizations need this kind of comprehensive coverage to secure sensitive data across their big data environments — including big data sources, infrastructure and analytic results. By using this single, unified security solution, you can be confident your organization will benefit from the latest and greatest big data applications while keeping secure your most sensitive and valuable asset – your data.

For more information, check out https://www.couchbase.com/partners/find-a-partner/

Author

Posted by Don Pinto, Principal Product Manager, Couchbase

Don Pinto is a Principal Product Manager at Couchbase and is currently focused on advancing the capabilities of Couchbase Server. He is extremely passionate about data technology, and in the past has authored several articles on Couchbase Server including technical blogs and white papers. Prior to joining Couchbase, Don spent several years at IBM where he maintained the role of software developer in the DB2 information management group and most recently as a program manager on the SQL Server team at Microsoft. Don holds a master's degree in computer science and a bachelor's in computer engineering from the University of Toronto, Canada.

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