Big Data is one of the most promising branches of the IT industry – but also one of the most vulnerable one.
What are the risks of using Big Data and how to protect your company from damage? Let’s find out!
Big benefits, big risks
As you might have already guessed, Big Data operates on, well, data – specifically personal data that contains sets of behaviors, trends, and preferences that we exhibit. With every year, each of us generates more and more of such data – in fact, in 2020, every person in the world has generated as much as 1,7 megabytes of data every second!
With more data, the existing security measures quickly become obsolete. This opens a way for cybercriminals to jump in, hoping to remain unnoticed among the enormous amounts of data – after all, who will notice? Implementing proper data security management protocols is the only safe way of protecting your data as a company – which is becoming increasingly important as security regulations get more and more complex.
But what exactly is Big Data security? After all, how do you even protect such vast amounts of data? And from what?
What are the dangers of Big Data?
Data security and privacy are the biggest concerns when it comes to the dangers of Big Data. Billions of records get exposed because of breaches and leaks every year, with sensitive information being exposed including personal details, credit card numbers, emails and passwords, and so on.
Companies are liable for breaches and mishandling of personal information and face the potential for paying devastating fines. To avoid that, companies need to implement proper security measures to prevent cybercriminals from gaining access to what should remain beyond their reach.
And companies aren’t the only ones facing repercussions – bank fraud and insurance scams are immensely widespread, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. The Internet is becoming more and more like a minefield, which you need to know how to safely maneuver through or you’re risking almost certain doom.
Malevolent use of Big Data is also becoming, unfortunately, a very common phenomenon. If you ever wondered how fake news and misinformation are so potent online, it’s in part to malicious third parties using Big Data to further their agenda. By gaining access to such data, they can determine the most effective ways of spreading misinformation, as well as establish who their potential viewers might be (i.e. those who are the most likely to believe their nonsense). This precedent might seem mostly harmless at first, but in the grand scale of things, such evildoers manage to influence our beliefs and ideas on a global scale – and we will never even realize it!
“But”, we hear you say, “how can we even protect ourselves from that?”. Well, there are a couple of ways.
Tools and measures to safeguard Big Data
While you can’t easily influence how other companies gather or handle their data (as well as what they do with it), you can make sure your company keeps its data safe. Keeping unauthorized users away from your data storages and blocking cybercriminals from accessing it through cyberattacks should be your primary concern.
The most common, and probably the most effective way of protecting Big Data is through encryption. Just like ancient Romans would encode their sensitive messages so that the enemy can’t decode them in an event of interception, so do modern IT companies encrypt the data they collect. This is the reason why very often even though a breach has happened, the personal data of customers is mostly safe – that data is encrypted, and decrypting it can take a considerable amount of time and resources, which most often isn’t worth it.
There are tons of ways of protecting – or at least trying to protect – your Big Data storages. From key management to physical security, every bit helps keep the data secure from evildoers. If your company deals with Big Data, which it most probably does in one way or another, it might be high time to take a good look at your security measures and verify whether they’re working correctly, and whether they’re enough in the first place.
After all, who would want to pay almost a billion dollars because you forced users to accept cookies?
