Ahana Announces New Security Capabilities to Bring Next Level of Security to the Data Lake

Ahana announced significant new security features added to its Ahana Cloud for Presto managed service. They include multi-user support for Presto and Ahana, fine-grained access control for data lakes with deep Apache Ranger integration, and audit support for all access. These are in addition to the recently announced one-click integration with AWS Lake Formation, a service that makes it easy to set up a secure data lake in a matter of hours.

The data lake isn’t just the data storage it used to be. More companies are using the data lake to store business-critical data and running critical workloads on top of it, making security on that data lake even more important. With these latest security capabilities, Ahana is bringing an even more robust offering to the Open Data Lake Analytics stack with Presto at its core.

“From day one we’ve focused on building the next generation of open data lake analytics. To address the needs of today’s enterprises that leverage the data lake, we’re bringing even more advanced security features to Ahana Cloud,” said Dipti Borkar, Cofounder and Chief Product Officer, Ahana. “The challenge with data lake security is in its shared infrastructure, and as more data is shared across an organization and different workloads are run on the same data, companies need fine-grained security policies to ensure that data is accessed by the right people. With these new security features, Ahana Cloud will enable faster adoption of advanced analytics with data lakes with advanced security built in.”

“Over the past year, we’ve been thrilled with what we’ve been able to deliver to our customers. Powered by Ahana, our data platform enables us to remain lean, bringing data to consumers when they need it,” said Omar Alfarghaly, Head of Data Science, Cartona. “With advanced security and governance, we can ensure that the right people access the right data.”

New security features include:

• Multi-user support for Presto: Data platform admins can now seamlessly manage users without complex authentication files and add or remove users for their Presto clusters. Unified user management is also extended across the Ahana platform and can be used across multiple Presto clusters. For example, a data analyst gets access to the analytics cluster but not to the data science cluster.
• Multi-user support for Ahana: Multiple users are now supported in the Ahana platform. An admin can invite additional users via the Ahana console. This is important for growing data platform teams.
• Apache Ranger support: Our open source plugin allows users to enable authorization in Ahana-managed Presto clusters with Apache Ranger for both the Hive Metastore or Glue Catalog queries, including fine-grained access control up to the column level across all clusters. In this newest release of the Ahana and Apache Ranger plug-in, all of the open source Presto and Apache Ranger work is now available in Ahana and it’s now incredibly easy to integrate through just a click of a button. With the Apache Ranger plugin, customers can easily add role-based authorization. Policies from Apache Ranger are also now cached in the plugin to enable little to no query time latency impact.  Previously, support for Apache Ranger was only available in open source using complicated config files.
• Audit support: With extended Apache Ranger capabilities, Ahana customers can enable centralized auditing of user access on Ahana-managed Presto clusters for comprehensive visibility. For example, you can track when users request access to data and if those requests are approved or denied based on their permission levels.
• AWS Lake Formation integration: Enforce AWS Lake Formation fine-grained data lake access controls with Ahana-managed Presto clusters.

“We’re seeing an increasing proportion of organizations using the cloud as their primary data lake platform to bring all of an enterprise’s raw structured and unstructured data together, realizing significant benefits such as creating a competitive advantage and helping lower operational costs,” said Matt Aslett, VP and Research Director, Ventana Research. “Capabilities such as governance mechanisms that allow for fine-grained access control remain important given the simplicity of the cloud. Innovations that allow for better data governance on the data lake, such as those Ahana has announced today, will help propel usage of more sophisticated use cases.”