Protegrity & Cloudera
overview
The Protegrity and Cloudera integration empowers organizations to securely manage and analyze sensitive data, bringing AI to data anywhere it lives—in data centers, public clouds, or at the edge. By combining Protegrity’s granular data protection with Cloudera’s data and AI platform customers can unlock the full potential of their data without compromise.
Field-level protection is applied directly within the Cloudera ecosystem—including Hive, Spark, Kafka, HBase, Impala, NiFi, Iceberg, and Flink—ensuring sensitive data remains governed and compliant while still fully usable for analytics and AI workloads. This joint solution removes barriers to secure data utilization, supports trusted data sharing, and simplifies compliance in the worlds most highly regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, and telecommunications—delivering a robust foundation for trusted, large-scale innovation where data is persistently protected, accessible, and actionable.
Features & Capabilities
01
Comprehensive, Fine-Grained Data Protection Across the Ecosystem
Why it matters
The integration provides broad and detailed data protection services, employing diverse methods to secure sensitive data throughout its lifecycle—at rest, in transit, and in use—across the extensive Cloudera ecosystem in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
How it works
Protegrity offers encryption, tokenization (including vaultless tokenization), masking, hashing, and access controls for a rich set of Cloudera services like Hive, Spark SQL, Kafka, Impala, HBase, MapReduce, HDFS Encryption, OS File System Encryption, and more recently Iceberg, Nifi, and Flink. It also operates at scale for the largest Cloudera customers.
02
Native and Purpose-Built Cloudera Integration
Why it matters
Protegrity has developed and fine-tuned specific data protectors that are native to and purpose-built for Cloudera services, ensuring seamless and deep integration into the platform’s architecture.
How ti works
Protegrity offers native protectors that explicitly support Cloudera, including Cloudera Data Engineering and Cloudera Data Warehouse. This also includes integration with Cloudera SDX components like Ranger for tokenization via Protegrity Big Data Protector.
03
Enhanced Data Consumption and Secure Innovation
Why It Matters
The integration enables increased data consumption on the Cloudera platform by removing security limitations on data flows, thereby accelerating the deployment of trusted AI, and advanced analytics use cases.
How it Works
Protegrity’s fine-grained data protection helps customers increase consumption on Cloudera by protecting sensitive data assets, unlocking critical workloads. This facilitates use cases such as AI and analytics, fraud detection, and trusted data sharing, and GenAI. A GSIB bank found that 70% of identified AWS use cases would have been blocked without Protegrity’s solution.
04
Centralized Governance with Clear Separation of Duties
Why It matters
The platform provides robust data governance through unified policy and key management, coupled with a strict separation of duties, isolating security administration to prevent unauthorised access and maintain operational integrity.
HOW IT WORKS
Protegrity offers Central Policy & Key Management to define how and when data is protected and who can access it. The Separation of Duties isolates security administration to security officers, ensuring that other technical roles like DBAs or programmers cannot access sensitive data in the clear or grant security access.
05
Secure Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Migration
Why It Matters
The integration ensures consistent data protection across diverse environments—Cloudera on premises and Cloudera on cloud—facilitating secure cloud migrations and enabling cross-border data privacy compliance without requiring extensive refactoring.
How it Works
The solution provides cloud native support across multiple form factors, including on-premises and hyper-scalars, for both traditional and Kubernetes-based clusters. This allows for secure cloud migration and helps organisations achieve cross-border data privacy compliance while retaining global analytical value.
Architecture &
Sample Data Flow
At the core of the Protegrity–Cloudera integration is an architecture built to provide persistent, fine-grained protection across the entire Cloudera ecosystem. From ingestion through NiFi and Kafka, to processing in Hive, Spark, and HBase, to advanced analytics with Iceberg and Flink, Protegrity secures sensitive data wherever it resides or flows. Rather than relying solely on access controls, protection is embedded at the data layer itself—ensuring information is consistently governed and remains usable for analytics, machine learning, and operational workloads across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
The data journey
Visualizing the data journey
The data journey explained
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01
Data ingestion—Protecting data as it enters Cloudera
Protegrity integrates with ingestion pipelines, including NiFi and Kafka, to automatically identify and protect sensitive fields as data is ingested into the Cloudera environment. Protection is applied before data is persisted, ensuring security from the start of the lifecycle.
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02
Data protection & transformation—Policies applied natively within Cloudera services
Through integration with Hive, Spark SQL, Spark Streaming, HBase, and Iceberg, Protegrity enforces tokenization, encryption, or masking policies dynamically at the field level. Centralized policies managed in the Enterprise Security Administrator (ESA) ensure consistent governance across workloads.
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03
Data Consumption & Analytics—Enabling secure queries and insights
Protegrity-protected datasets can be queried through Hive, Impala, or Spark without exposing raw values. Business intelligence dashboards, reports, and applications consume governed data that retains analytical value while ensuring confidentiality.
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04
AI/ML Enablement—Accelerating trusted analytics at scale
De-identified or tokenized datasets are available for advanced analytics and ML/AI pipelines running on Spark or Cloudera AI services. This enables organizations to train predictive models on anonymized data and securely apply them to governed datasets, reducing time-to-insight while maintaining compliance.
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05
Data Sharing & Collaboration—Securely extending Cloudera data
Cloudera’s multi-cloud and hybrid data-sharing capabilities are enhanced by Protegrity’s persistent protection. Enterprises can confidently share governed data across departments, geographies, or external partners while adhering to local privacy laws and cross-border restrictions.
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06
Monitoring & Auditing—Comprehensive governance and compliance reporting
All Protegrity protection activities within Cloudera are logged and auditable. These detailed logs integrate with Cloudera SDX (via Ranger) and enterprise monitoring systems, enabling centralized reporting and streamlined audits.
DEPLOYMENT
The Protegrity–Cloudera integration is designed for flexible deployment across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments, providing consistent protection at scale.
Native Platform Support:
Broad Ecosystem Coverage:
SDX Integration:
Flexible Form Factors:
Centralized Management:
This deployment model allows enterprises to protect data at rest, in motion, and in use across the Cloudera ecosystem while enabling secure analytics, AI/ML, and regulatory compliance without disrupting existing workflows.
RESOURCES
Quick reads and deep dives to help your team plan, deploy, and scale Protegrity on Cloudera—field-level controls, governed sharing, and no slowdowns for analytics or AI.
Solution Brief:
Protegrity + Cloudera
How data-centric security unlocks analytics & AI on Cloudera—field-level controls, SDX alignment, and fit-for-purpose methods for governed speed and scale
READ MORECIO Report:
Cloud, AI & Compliance—All Together
What regulated firms need to modernize safely: tokenization, FPE, masking, anonymization, and synthetic data—plus a practical path across hybrid/multi-cloud.
READ MORECustomer Results:
Global Bank at Scale
See how a top-5 bank achieved 126% ROI in 8 months while protecting 27B transactions/day across 100+ countries—without slowing analytics or adding audit drag
READ MOREOn-Demand Webinar:
Secure Cloud & AI
A 35-minute session with Cloudera, AWS & Protegrity on embedding privacy-enhancing tech and integrated governance to use 100% of your data—safely.
READ MOREFrequently
Asked Questions
Here are five common questions related to the integration, deployment, and features of the Cloudera and Protegrity solution, with their answers: