Organizations today are building applications that juggle huge amounts of data to provide engaging and responsive user experiences. While most of the data is likely innocuous, some of it may be highly-sensitive or contain personally identifying information. This is why securing private data remains a top priority for businesses today. In-memory data grid technology is only one part of an enterprise’s complete data ecosystem; however, as data grids rise in strategic importance, organizations are increasingly using them to store and secure their sensitive enterprise application data.

In-memory data grids like JBoss Data Grid accelerate application performance and provide elastic scalability and high availability. But, the distributed nature of data grids also brings new challenges to securing data. For those organizations storing sensitive data in the grid, Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 6.3 beta offers improvements for how applications and users access and manage that data. It is currently available as a free download for members of the JBoss Developer community and for JBoss customers via the Red Hat Customer Portal.

New role-based access control (RBAC) has been added for both the CacheManagers and Caches components and is designed to integrate with existing security and identity infrastructure. This allows only trusted users and applications to be able to access data in the grid. We also strengthened security for clusters storing sensitive data. Now, communication between the nodes that make up the cluster can be encrypted. Additionally, new nodes can be required to authenticate, and only authenticated nodes that are authorized to join the cluster will be permitted to join.

Generally speaking, data grids help improve application performance by resolving data bottlenecks and providing scalability and high availability for heterogeneous data environments. In today’s digital world, it can be argued that enterprise applications are synonymous with the business. More secure and better performing applications can lead to a more secure and better performing business.

Interested in learning more or trying out JBoss Data Grid 6.3 beta, or have ideas about new features or functionality you’d like to see in future versions? Join us at http://www.jboss.org/products/jdg to download the beta, ask questions, leave feedback, and more. Current Red Hat customers may also access these resources through the customer portal https://access.redhat.com/site/products/red-hat-jboss-data-grid.