(gigaom.com) -- As big data becomes a potential game-changer for businesses, the security risks become even greater. Now that businesses have collected and stored all of this data, what are they going to do with it? How are they going to protect it? And most importantly, how are they going to use if safely and legitimately?
Users are increasingly alarmed by the amount of data being collected, with whom the data is being shared and how it is being used. Clearly, there needs to be better engagement among key stakeholders and joined-up thinking throughout organizations — from the chief marketing officer to the IT department — to develop guidelines and best practices for the usage, storage and transfer of data both inside and outside the business.
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From the information security standpoint, the key issues surrounding big data tend to fall into the following five areas:
Data aggregation and big data analytics promise businesses a treasure trove of marketing intelligence. The ability to target customers based on the combination of past buying patterns, sentiment and previously “private” preferences are the Holy Grail for marketers. But business leaders eager to adopt these new technologies for business benefit will be well advised to understand the legal and other restrictions that may apply across multiple jurisdictions. They should also implement privacy best practices and design them into the analytics programs, build in transparency and accountability, and never lose sight of big data’s effect on people, processes and technology.
It goes without saying that securing both the data inputs and big data outputs present a key challenge that can impact not just potential business campaigns and opportunities, but also have far reaching legal implications. The answer? Stay agile and ideally anticipate changes to regulation rather than being caught when they suddenly appear.
That being said, it is still early days and we have not yet seen a tremendous amount of external requirements mandating that businesses assure information integrity. However, the sheer scale of information processed by businesses remains on the increase and with big data analytics bringing business decisions closer and closer to raw data, the quality of information has become increasingly important. If the same sophisticated analysis can be applied to relevant security data, big data may even be used to improve information security.
While such solutions may not yet appear to be widespread, you can be assured they are well on the way with big data analytics already being used for fraud prevention, cyber security detection, social analysis and real-time multimodal surveillance.
Steve Durbin is global vice president of the Information Security Forum (ISF). His main areas of focus include the emerging security threat landscape, cyber security, consumerization and outsourced cloud security. Previously, he was senior vice president at Gartner.
Image courtesy of Flickr user KellBailey.
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