As the recent RSA Conference, there were scores of vendors offering various endpoint solutions to protect laptops, desktop and mobile devices. These software solutions are clearly needed given the value of the data on these devices.

When it comes to Hadoop, firms are storing massive amounts of data (massive as in petabytes and more); often without the same level of security they have on a laptop.

In Hadoop Security: Protecting Your Big Data Platform, (O'Reilly Media ISBN: 978-1-4919-0098-7), authors Ben Spivey and Joey Echeverria have written an invaluable reference for anyone looking to ensure their Hadoop data sets are appropriated secured. This is the type of book that you want your Hadoop administrators to have close by.

Hadoop is one part of an open-source software framework for big data. The authors correctly note that one of the hardest jobs a Hadoop security administrator has is to keep track of how the many components handle security, access control and other authentication functions.

With that, the book does a great job in providing the reader with a thorough overview of the various aspects of the Hadoop security framework. The authors detail how to correctly configure the security features for each of the components. The authors also provide actual code segments for each of the areas.

Anyone using Hadoop should certainly make sure their staff knows about the security controls required to keep their data sets safe. For that, make sure they read Hadoop Security: Protecting Your Big Data Platform.