The only thing Constant in life is 'Change' & nothing else can be true about it than 'Technology'. Technology today is changing at rapid pace and more so are the latest buzz words. The new buzzword these days is 'Big Data'.
Its a small name for a powerful concept: more precisely that data has utility and when data size increases exponentially, the utility of data increases non linearly. In other words opportunities to make use of data for productivity compound along with the size of the data and so does its management.
This should be more relevant to Organizations who are going through Cloud transition. Since they are trying to centralize, standardize and virtualize at the data that leads to centralization and aggregation of data that transforms the dispersed datasets across their environment to a centralized aggregated 'Big Data'.
For those in Information Security, 'Big Data' poses a 'Threat' as well as an 'Opportunity'.
Threat
It is needless to say that centralized, extremely large volumes of data has a significant security impact. Imagine you storing all your jewelry in one Cupboard in one of your homes. Although it becomes simpler for you to manage the inventory of the jewelry, it also is a big risk, since the thieves know that all your jewelry is in one place & they target that once place. Although you may implement 100 security controls to that cupboard but you are never sure that your jewelry is 100% safe. Similarly if all your data is in one single location, it is an easy target for the hackers, since they now know that they have a specific place to target their attack.
However, its not always the 'Worthiness' of the target that constituents a risk. It is also because the huge size of data that pose challenge to implement security controls. Just imagine to implement a security solution of encrypting an exabyte of data!!! Also consider that fact that how many AV, IDS and DLP solutions would actually work on this amount of data.
Hence not only does the big data overwhelm information security folks, the tools required to implement security controls over this data are also complicated to deploy. Thus big data makes information security professionals think on the security solutions to implement in an effective and cost efficient manner.
Opportunity
Along with Threats, there are also Opportunities. Although distributed or dispersed data has an advantage of not having a targeted attack to gain entire information, it also has a problem of 'Where does my organization data live?' and 'Where all do i put my security controls?'
By this i mean - Information Security professionals have challenge on identifying valuable / business critical data and to implement cost effective solutions to implement it. For e.g. if you have a 20 grand diamond necklace in one place and 30 grand gold in another place, what security controls will you implement at these locations if you have a limited budget.
As data becomes centralized, while the specifics of data storage at a central location becomes complicated, the "sprawl" of the data within the enterprise can be reduced. Getting away from this "sprawl" can be beneficial as we can improv the security controls over the centralized data.
Moreover, the data itself can be analyzed to find fraud since all the data is available at a centralized place. What is required is a data mining solution that can mine the data and provide us only the useful data that needs to be protected.
Last but not the least, its an opportunity to revisit the legacy environment and apply resources to secure the data. Anything that makes the management to think on investing in information security is a way for the savvy information security practitioner to capitalize. Information Security is obviously a huge part of data strategy for any organization, so facing the 'big data' movement, obviously is a challenging and interesting journey of a Security professional.
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