Important factors that play a key role in big data security

Published April 6, 2016   |   

Computers rule today’s world. Gone are the days when you would sit with files and paperwork and stack up on important documents and such. Sure you would work with files and folders , but that would be over  your computer screen or the smart phone. With successive growth and expansion, stakeholders want their business to be based more and more on numbers- percentiles, probabilities, which would depict their sales reports and other such data.  Thus big data comes into play and companies employ more man power to build data extraction and aggregation tools. Big data allows the advantage of helping large companies modify their products to suit the needs of the buyers, recognise the marketing flaws and exchange data with other business corporations world-wide.

But alongside these big legit organisations, run an equally enormous set of cyber crimes, who’d do anything to lay their hands on the consolidated data. This can be very destroying for the companies, when their security is breached by the cyber attackers and so much data is put at stake. The data, in a nutshell, is what a company basically runs on- customer information, employee details, secrets of the trade, everything. This data breach proves even more devastating when it comes to companies that work with the government like, healthcare services or large financial corporations.

So, securing big data becomes pivotal for any organisation, for its better future. But this again, comes with its own hurdles. Firstly, the mass and diversity of big data increases security challenges three folds. The data is deposited from various sources across the world, which comes with its own access prohibitions and security agenda, which makes it tough to extract the meaning and accumulate data while maintaining apt security for the data sources.

Secondly, the big data environments are diverse- in the sense, they’re scattered everywhere in the network, making them more complex and easier to an attack. Thirdly, many of the tools used in data programming, are outdated and they do not incorporate security in their structure. So, there are chances of unrestricted access for anybody who uses the program with no such thing as identity guard. These various problems faced by the multinational organisations can be dealt with the help of an efficient data security steps. Some of them are :-

  • Avoiding unauthorised access.

When you have unprecedented volume of data, the first thing you could do is not let them fall in the wrong hands. And this can be done by proper authentication of those who’d be dealing with the data. You may include government aided encryption and changeable password policies, etc. Lest you’d be searching the internet for identity theft protection reviews.

  • Securing sources of big data.

The diversification of big data implies that there must be an even more diverse set of sources from where they’re obtained. Securing these sources becomes essential in order to maintain the integrity of the files as there is significant chance for malicious input of data.

  • Separating the transfer of the most important and sensitive data.

The companies do not place systematic policies to categorise their most important data and this lack of control is where they go wrong. The best way to go about if would be to understand the basics properly, i.e, to find out which parts of the data is of utmost importance , setting down rules to handle it, exerting technical control over the data to ensure that it is handled well, and spread the norms of its usage amongst the users.

  • Analysing the performance to avoid it slowing down.

Performance optimisation is highly necessary to ensure its proper runtime. It’s well known that small changes in the performance can bring about a huge impact on it overall efficacy. So keep a constant check on how your system is managing the data and how quickly your work is being completed. Otherwise , it will only slow down the company’s progress.

  • Have security constraints and software’s on the internet connection.

Security constraints proclaim how well protect the content really is. It defines the access privileges to the massive data that is being transferred ,saved and extracted daily. So if you’ve not set up that firewall protection, you better buckle-up or else you’d be paving a fine pavement for the criminal groups.