Starting big data projects for any kind of use case can be tricky at the best of times, but Hortonworks thinks it’s got the perfect solution to this problem.
The Hortonworks DataPlane Service (DPS) aims to make it easy to provision and operate distributed data systems, with the company promising ease of use, secure data, and assurance that governance requirements are met.
DPS will offer core capabilities to control clusters, enable central security and governance, and will also integrate with other existing sources that an organisation might be running.
In essence, Hortonworks wants to make take some of the pressure of data engineers, architects, data scientists and so on as they seek to keep up to date with new technologies like machine learning, a constantly changing regulatory environment, and a cornucopia of other issues. 
Hortonworks DPS promises to give data stewards the ability to investigate lineage, so that redundancies are eliminated across data sets and the quality can be improved. For data engineers there’s the promise to be able to move, backup, and restore data across environments and sources while implementing a data storage tiering policy.
The new service offers the ability to automatically enforce security and governance policies, thus making data architects lives a bit simpler, and data scientists will be able to apply models across types of data and gain access to data regardless of where it lives so that insights can be discovered.
Data source integration is on offer to allow users to register and create data sources to allow consolidated access. Data services catalogue is said to allow for full configuration and management utilities for using new services, and it also offers security control for doing things like controlling persona definitions.
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“The evolution and maturity of the market has given rise to the need for an enterprise-viable global data management platform that can capture data at rest and data in motion while consistently and reliably securing, governing and managing those data assets,” said Rob Bearden, CEO, Hortonworks.
“Since our inception, Hortonworks has been enabling and evolving the modern data architecture. Now, with Hortonworks DataPlane Service, enterprises will be able to consistently manage and secure all their data assets across environments, opening new business value.”
As part of the on-going partnership with IBM, Big Blue will integrate its Unified Governance Platform with DPS, the hope being that they’ll be used together and an enterprise-wide governance program can be created and implemented.
“This builds on our shared view that data governance is becoming a must-have, as clients face the need for self-service analytics, and deal with new regulations such as GDPR,” said Rob Thomas, General Manager, IBM Analytics. “IBM believes that we are evolving to a multi-cloud world, and Hortonworks DPS is key for integrating disparate datasets in a multi-cloud environment.”
Further benefits of the service will be its extensible services that’ll come from both Hortonworks and its partners. The first extension is the Hortonworks Data Lifecycle Manager, which does exactly what it says on the tin – manages the lifecycle of data.
