We so often hear about companies putting "customers first" that the very notion can seem trite. But when it comes to innovation, listening to and learning from your customers is an absolute imperative. At Gazzang, the company I work for, we have a mantra that borders on religious fanaticism.

“Customers First. Always.”

It’s the reason we can claim deep expertise in securing unique, enterprise-scale big data environments. It’s the reason we know cloud encryption better than anyone else. And it’s the reason no one on our customer support team owns a bed.

It was a handful of high-profile Amazon customers who gave us the impetus to build our latest cloud data security solution, Gazzang CloudEncrypt™.

Gazzang CloudEncrypt was designed to meet specific customer use cases for securing sensitive data at every stage of the Amazon EMR process. This is a very different challenge than encrypting data on a persisted cloud platform like Amazon EC2, which can be done with readily available solutions like Gazzang zNcrypt and zTrustee.

CloudEncrypt offers encryption and key management in ephemeral, burstable Amazon EMR processes. The solution, which you can read about in great detail in this white paper, addresses two very clear customer challenges associated with data security in EMR:

1. How to ensure data is always encrypted and protected in Amazon EMR
2. How to be sure the encryption keys (and there can be hundreds of thousands) are centrally managed either in a separate cloud instance or on-premises in the customer data center.

More detailed customer use cases are covered in the white paper, but the top three we’ve heard thus far are as follows:

• Enabling compliance initiatives around HIPAA, PCI, FERPA and EU Data Privacy
• Resolving data residency issues and providing the data owner with more leverage in the case of a subpoena concerns
• Preventing unauthorized access to source and MapReduce data outputs

We're excited to bring CloudEncrypt to customers and look forward, as always, to your feedback.