Business strategies are increasingly driven by the integrated analysis of huge volumes of hetero-geneous data, coming from different sources such for example social media or Internet of Thingsdevices. The so called Big Data are considered as relevant assets by companies and organizations,since they can be analysed to create new valuable knowledge and insights that could help managersin their strategic decisions. The full potential of Big Data could be realized if the information wascoming from several distinct sources, with different characteristics and target audience. Although,data producers are not always willing to share their data with other companies due to lack of trustand the absence of a data protection framework which can be adopted in a Big Data environment. Inthis work, we present BigUCON, a framework which exploits the Usage Control paradigm in orderto provide an enhanced, expressive and flexible authorization support for data protection within theaforementioned environment. The framework is integrated in Apache Hadoop, a software librarywhich provides the infrastructure for storing, mining and processing large data sets through a collec-tion of open-source software.