Dataguise secures data for growing big data market, and gets $13M boost

Dataguise, a company that seeks to secure the corporate data used by big data-crunching technologies such as Hadoop, has raised $13 million in a second round of funding.

The Hadoop framework has become the leading way large organizations analyze their huge amounts of data. A number of Hadoop technology providers, including Cloudera, are helping businesses analyze this data, that can run in the petabytes, and is collected everywhere from their server logs to traffic stats from mobile applications.

However, company security officers have become concerned about the safety of the sometimes sensitive corporate information accessed by the Hadoop process.

DataGuise, a company based in Fremont, Calif., said its technology gives companies an easy to way to determine where and how to secure their sensitive data in Hadoop. In a statement, the company said it does this by processing terabytes of structured and unstructured data in a few hours, and by offering the following features:

• Contextual-based data discovery: The Dataguise contextual-based data discovery capability uses a “neural-like network” approach for highly accurate sensitive data search instead of a simple “rule-based” approach. As a result, information surrounding a given string is correlated and complex inferences are made to determine whether that string is relevant to the search.
• Selective encryption: Complementing Dataguise masking technology for configurations where data mining needs to operate on actual data values. DG for Hadoop uses symmetric key based encryption of data and also encrypts the encryption keys themselves for stronger security.
• Consistent masking across a single or multiple Hadoop clusters: This capability preserves analytical value of information for trend analysis and aggregations.
• Simplified management: DG for Hadoop provides automatic notifications so that security personnel can be alerted by e-mail or SMS when a job is completed or when changes occur.
• Compliance audit reports: New reporting that compliance auditors can integrate in their analysis of the company’s overall compliance process and posture.

The company’s second round of financing was led by Toba Capital, with additional capital coming from the investment arm of an unnamed “electronic conglomerate,” the company said in a statement.

Dataguise has now raised at least $20.3 million. Two years ago, it said it had raised $7.3 million in a first round of funding, including $3.25 million from Silicon Valley investor Herb Madan.

The worldwide big data technology and services market will grow at a 31.7 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) – about seven times the rate of the overall information and communication technology (ICT) market, according to IDC’s most recent worldwide Big Data technology and services market forecast. Revenues will reach $23.8 billion in 2016, according to the forecast.