Introducing Anaconda Team Edition: Secure Open-Source Data Science for the Enterprise

I’m very excited to announce a new addition to Anaconda’s product line — Anaconda Team Edition!

For the last few years, Anaconda has offered two products: our free Anaconda Distribution, meant for individual practitioners, and Anaconda Enterprise, our full-featured machine learning platform for the enterprise. This left a gap for many data scientists and developers who use Anaconda professionally, but whose companies either do not yet need a fully-featured machine learning platform, or are building their own solution.

But even for these companies, open-source data science and machine learning tools are largely undermanaged. There are thousands of open-source packages data scientists and developers could bring into an organization, unaware of potential security or licensing implications. Moreover, these packages have complex inter-dependencies and intricate build requirements, which are underserved by traditional IT OSS management solutions.

Many of our enterprise users have been asking for the convenience and security of mirroring Anaconda’s repository onto their own infrastructure, using an official facility rather than relying on our community-facing free services. This is why we are offering Anaconda Team Edition.

With Team Edition, companies can mirror our repository and stay up-to-date with open-source innovations, while managing and securing the software artifacts to enterprise standards. The repository can be integrated into an organization’s custom-built machine learning platform, or it can stand on its own as a security and management tool for open source. Team Edition brings together important benefits for IT managers and practitioners alike:

Harness Innovation from the Open-Source Community

The open-source data science and machine learning community has developed and continues to develop some of the most cutting-edge technologies in the industry. At Anaconda, we fundamentally believe that open-source community collaborations will always out-innovate proprietary vendor walled-gardens. (This is one reason open-source packages are so popular among data scientists.) With Team Edition, companies with even the strictest requirements (e.g. air-gapped, on-prem) can adopt open source while complying with IT. Faster, more seamless IT approval means happier and more productive data scientists.

Manage Open-Source Projects

Team Edition brings transparency around the use of open-source Python, R, and Conda packages and empowers managers to understand the who, what, when, and where of open-source projects in their organization. With Team Edition, administrators can see precisely what artifacts and binaries were used in models and who used them, making it easier to audit machine learning models. They can also filter packages based on open-source license type, to avoid risk of legal exposure.

Secure Your Open-Source Pipeline

Packages included with Team Edition are curated by our experts for security and stability. Every package has a CVE vulnerability score, and alerts and reports are provided to address vulnerabilities as they are identified. Administrators can also curate, block, and safelist packages. Team Edition keeps track of and displays package dependencies, making it possible to identify vulnerabilities across dependent packages.

Be a Strategic Adopter

If you think Anaconda Team Edition might be useful for your team, I encourage you to learn more about our Strategic Adopter program. Strategic Adopters are among the first purchasers of Team Edition and they provide product feedback and a case study in exchange for reduced pricing. See our Team Edition page to learn more.