Frequently Asked Questions

What is Koverse?

Koverse, Inc., an SAIC company, empowers customers to use data to gain understanding and drive mission-impacting decisions and actions.

Who uses Koverse?

Our Koverse Data Platform (KDP) technology is trusted by government organizations and highly regulated commercial industries such as healthcare, financial services, and more.

Is Koverse a software or services company?

Koverse is a software company that also provides professional services when customers want help building solutions on top of our software.

Where is Koverse located?

Koverse is headquartered in Seattle with hubs in Denver and the Washington, D.C. metro area.

What makes Koverse different than other platforms?

KDP is a commercial off-the-shelf product that provides Zero Trust for data by enforcing attribute-based access controls (ABAC), allowing customers to safely work with their complex and sensitive data to power the most demanding analytics, data science, and AI use cases. Until now, there was no easy way to do this. KDP’s open architecture reduces the time to production and the costs of development and data management. KDP allows resources to pivot from data management tasks to high-value development to drive analytic, data science, and AI use cases faster.

Why do I need Koverse?

Founded by former NSA data architects, Koverse created a security-first platform with unprecedented scale, performance, and flexibility. KDP provides Zero Trust for data by enforcing attribute-based access controls (ABAC), allowing customers to safely work with their complex and sensitive data. Data is maintained in its original form, enabling the flexibility to apply context at the time of use to rapidly respond to new and evolving use cases and adapt to an ever-changing environment with agility and speed.

What can I build with KDP?

You can build a wide variety data-driven solutions on top of KDP, including applications involving analytics, data science, and AI. KDP is particularly well-suited for solutions that involve a large volume and/or variety of data sources and types, including complex and sensitive data.

What kind of content can I load on KDP?

KDP rapidly ingests, indexes, and secures all data, including structured and unstructured, batch and continuous, and classified and unclassified data, from any source, without requiring ETL or data characterization.

How long and what kind of skills are required to load a new dataset?

If you have a supported data type, you can load a new dataset in minutes, using only the user interface; no code or console commands are required.

Can KDP handle proprietary or custom data protocols and formats?

Yes. If you have a data format that KDP does not parse out of the box, or your data is stored in a location that KDP does not connect to out of the box, you will need to use our API to build a custom parser or connector that will plug into KDP. This typically takes about a day and requires development in Java or Scala.

How long and what kind of skills are required to run an existing transform?

Customers can quickly build and productionize multiple use cases with low code or no code capabilities, saving months of development and certification time. Custom transforms (analytics) can be built and deployed in days or weeks, depending on their complexity, using the Koverse API. This requires development in Java, Scala, or Python.

Can KDP handle streaming workloads?

Yes.

I want to have a customized solution built. Can Koverse help me?

Yes, you can build it yourself with your own team or our Global Services team can assist you.

How is KDP different than a BI tool or data warehouse?

KDP is different from traditional BI tools and data warehouses in that it is designed to enable scalable data solutions for a range of non-traditional use cases that require a combination of precision search, analytics, data science, AI and ML, and stringent security controls. Furthermore, KDP makes new data rapidly accessible without requiring ETL or data characterization, and it integrates with your existing tools and applications. In many cases, KDP can complement enterprise BI tools and data warehouse capabilities that may already be in use by an organization.

How is KDP different than a traditional search technology like Elastic Search?

KDP is unique in combining search with original record storage, analytics, and cell-level access control into one system, eliminating the need to duplicate data between search and analysis systems. While KDP can support many of the same queries provided by Elastic Search, KDP goes beyond Elastic Search by automatically discovering data schemas, giving users the option of indexing any and all data without having to declare indexing policies up front. KDP also supports searching across multiple datasets at once, and the ability to find a search term in any field.

How is KDP different than the big data, open-source ecosystem?

KDP is a scalable, big data platform that runs on top of a curated set of open-source components including Accumulo and Hadoop. Unlike a collection of loosely integrated components that engineers must compose into a usable application, KDP gives users a unified, higher-level platform and API on which powerful applications can be rapidly developed. In addition, KDP provides a powerful and tightly integrated way of working with datasets, making it vastly simpler to manage indexing and search, analytic monitoring and scheduling, and ingestion and access control that these open-source components do not provide.

What tools do you provide for data engineers, analysts and data scientists?

KDP allows data engineers, analysts, and data scientists to use many of the most popular tools while making common tasks simpler. For example, data scientists can use KDP to pull in datasets that are automatically structured for rapid prototyping and analysis within interactive notebooks such as Jupyter and Zeppelin. Data engineers can take portions of code written to leverage the popular Spark API or SQL and package them into reusable components that non-developers can use to build sophisticated data processing pipelines. Analysts can use KDP’s UI to explore data interactively, search for relevant subsets and download them, or pull data into other tools such as Excel and Tableau to do manipulations on their desktop. And of course, all these methods of working with data are governed by KDP’s advanced access control features, which data owners can easily configure to comply with regulations and policy.

Will users need admin access to use KDP? Or can anyone with a user account query the platform?

KDP has robust accessed-based access controls. Users can be granted access to only limited aspects of the system independently including data processing, ingest, search and administration.

When I install KDP, what am I installing?

Installation includes the KDP server and web app, and possibly Hadoop, Accumulo, and Zookeeper, if not already installed.

Do I need to set up a Hadoop cluster to run KDP?

KDP runs as an application on top of Apache Hadoop and Accumulo. It is easy to install if you already have a Cloudera or Hortonworks cluster running. If you do not already have a Hadoop cluster, and do not wish to stand one up yourself, Koverse can run your cluster as a managed service.

Can KDP run on my own hardware?

You can run KDP on-site on your own hardware or in the cloud.

What operating systems does KDP run on?

KDP, like the Hadoop ecosystem, runs on Linux operating systems. Recommended operating systems are listed here.

Could you provide a description of the Data Store that you use?

KDP is the only platform that uses Apache Accumulo as the sole storage system for all original records and indexes, thereby providing superior data security and scalability.

Does KDP index everything? If so, doesn’t that waste a lot of storage space?

KDP can be configured to index everything, or a subset of fields chosen by users. Typically, indexing storage costs are comparable to original record storage. Many users take advantage of lower costs of disk storage to achieve a search capability beyond what previous systems were able to provide, and to more speculatively explore using analytics to transform raw data into highly valuable result sets that back powerful new applications for digitizing business.

Can KDP integrate with my existing enterprise authentication system?

Yes.

Didn’t find an answer to your question?

Contact us at support@koverse.com