Data lake query engine vendor Ahana announced the general availability Wednesday of new security features for its managed service running in the cloud.
Ahana, a data startup founded in 2020 and based in San Mateo, Calif., provides support and services for running the open source Presto query engine. The company's flagship offering is the Ahana Cloud for Presto service that runs in AWS, which became generally available at the end of 2020. Ahana is now integrating a series of enhanced security capabilities to the service, including support for Apache Ranger, an open source data security framework. Access control for users is also getting a boost with secured multi-user support enabling distributed data teams to use the platform. Integration with the AWS Lake Formation data lake service is also part of the update providing enhanced security access controls.
Security and governance on data lakes is a big deal right now.
Mike LeoneAnalyst, ESG
"Security and governance on data lakes is a big deal right now," said Mike Leone, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "In fact, ESG research shows that the most important consideration when it comes to data lake deployments is security."
Improving Presto data lake security with Ahana
The need to secure data lake information is not lost on Dipti Borkar, co-founder and chief product officer at Ahana. Borkar said that as platform teams increasingly use data lakes, more data is ending up in them. That includes enterprise data about the business and operational data, as well data coming from IoT sensors.
Among the updated capabilities is enhanced multi-user support. Presto has native built-in multi-user support, according to Borkar, but it is manually configured. She said that with the new Ahana update, multi-user configuration is all done via a graphical user interface on the platform. The multi-user support also extends across all the managed Presto clusters an organization is using, enabling a unified management control capability across the clusters.
Additional security is provided via an integration with AWS Lake Formation, which provides a set of AWS services for data lakes, including access control capabilities. Borkar said that with AWS Lake Formation, Ahana-managed Presto users can benefit from table- and column-level access control to data lake information.
Ahana has integrated support for the open source Apache Ranger data lake security framework, which provides audit control for accessing Ahana-managed Presto data query clusters in the cloud.
Bringing Apache Ranger to help secure Presto data lakes
Apache Ranger was first developed as an open source technology to provide security policies for Hadoop data lake deployments.
Borkar said Ahana developed an open source plugin that enables Ranger security policies to be applied to Presto.
Ranger, meanwhile, has the ability to audit data lake access by user and content. It also brings in role-based access control integration to help control visibility into different sets of data stored in a data lake.
Looking forward, Borkar said the next big set of improvements that Ahana is working on are performance-related, as the demand for data lake query engine technology continues to grow with increasingly large volumes of data.
Enterprise Strategy Group is a division of TechTarget.
