Big data security

The term big data has come into use recently to refer to the ever-increasing amount of information that organisations are storing, processing and analysing, owing to the growing number of information sources in use. According to research conducted by IDC, there were 1.8 zettabytes (1.8 trillion gigabytes) of information created and replicated in 2011 alone and that amount is doubling every two years. 1 Within the next decade, the amount of information managed by enterprise datacentres will grow by 50 times, whereas the number of IT professionals will expand by just 1.5 times. Data volumes continue to expand as they take in an ever-wider range of sources, much of which is in unstructured form. Organisations want to extract value from that data to uncover the opportunities for the business that it contains. But the centralised nature of big data stores creates new security challenges. Traditional tools are not, on their own, up to the task of processing the information the data contains, let alone ensuring it's secure in the process. Colin Tankard of Digital Pathways explains that controls need to be placed around the data itself, rather than the applications and systems that store the data.