Keeping your big data safe and secure

An organisation’s big data is one of the most powerful assets it holds. With the right computing infrastructure to process it all, big data is full of insight that can add value in a variety of ways to a business. But big data comes with additional privacy and security concerns – what are the implications of this and how can businesses keep their big data secure? 

The actual size of big data is a red herring - what matters is the actionable insight big data can deliver. We feel that only a full metal infrastructure can process big data fast enough to deliver that real-time insight– you get the data crunched fast, with cloud flexibility and it meets privacy requirements too.

A privacy headache?
So big data is more complex, faster and more flexible. A powerful tool for any business yet it is comes with previously unforeseen security and privacy issues, especially when processed in the cloud.

In 2013 much of big data is social data, which in turns means that it is mostly personal data. Whilst consumers are (by and large) happy to give up elements of their personal data, few have knowingly consented to have that data crunched, analysed and dissected.

I don’t believe that many companies have considered that issue. It is hard to accurately define a privacy policy that allows a business to make effective use of big data but that also keeps consumers happy. Part of the problem is that when you bring together disparate data sources it increases the exposure around an individual. Essentially, what is non-sensitive in isolation can become sensitive when combined with other data sets.

Big data and the cloud
A further security headache is the on-going link between cloud and big data. Businesses are unlikely to build their own in-house big data environment so the cloud is used regularly. To protect data effectively requires attribute based encryption to protect the most sensitive data and apply access controls – this is not something many businesses have done nor would be particularly comfortable doing.

Software bugs are another source of potential security headaches when working with big data. Few organisations hold as much data as Facebook and earlier this year a bug accidentally divulged the personal information of six million users. Facebook explained this was because some codes inadvertently caused the personal details of potential contacts to be associated with other users’ account data.

So security leaks can come from anywhere and there are privacy issues associated with big data that many organisations are yet to consider. Which is why we have created a high-performance environment for big data applications that is also secure and robust.

Our hardware is physically isolated with no shared resources, meaning there is no danger of outside interference and security risk. Users can meet different countries’ data privacy requirements by choosing exactly where their data is hosted.

No software is ever truly bug-free and organisations have a responsibility to their users to protect their privacy as much as possible. So using a bare metal infrastructure that still allows them to scale is an important step. It allows businesses to ensure better data privacy, without driving up costs. There are many benefits from using big data and it is prudent to address any security or privacy concerns head-on to ensure use of big data is not impacted and its benefits diluted.