Big Data Needs Big Security

- David Canellos, president and CEO of PerspecSys (www.perspecsys.com):

“Big data” is currently one of the hottest topics in IT, technology and business. At its core, big data encompasses the idea that massive amounts of business data, if harnessed effectively and efficiently, can be mined to deliver critical business insights that can transform a business. A new class of companies, such as Zynga, is fuelling this ‘data boom’ by making it easier than ever for enterprises to perform analytics on massive stores of data. The data can include interactions with customers on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., as well as interactions from call centers and e-mail, and notes from traditional sales representatives. All vertical industries can potentially benefit from analytics on this type of data. (For example, McKinsey & Co. estimated that retail chains can use analytics to increase their margins by 60 percent.)

Big data’s potential should be of particular interest to organizations going through a cloud transition. Why? Because efforts to virtualize, centralize and standardize inevitably lead to data aggregation. And while the data can be harnessed to deliver tremendous business value, data aggregation comes with a security downside.

It goes without saying that centralized, extremely large volumes of data carry significant security risk, primarily because hackers love to focus on them. I cannot think of a more appealing target for a cybercriminal who wants to infiltrate your organization’s core information assets.

Are your Cloud Service Providers’ security standards up to the same level as your own? Enterprises have made tremendous investments over the past 10 years to ensure they have a hardened infrastructure and a set of policies to protect sensitive data stored and processed internally. Now they are scratching their heads thinking about how they can get that same security for their assets stored and transported via the cloud. Our advice?  Look for ways that let you leverage the cloud, but keep your sensitive data close to home.  Big Data in the Cloud – Sensitive Data at Home . . . that is a recipe for success.