Protecting big data

Sharing data can be dangerous. If you’re going to share your big data, you need to make sure security is in place wherever you’re sharing it to first. Protecting big data will not only keep your company free from embarrassing breaches, but it also protects your business, clients, customers or suppliers whose information you are sharing, and of course there are compliance and monetary impacts if the data is misused. Security has become a fundamental prerequisite for sharing big data, however, many companies are struggling to properly manage their big data.

Some basic security measures you should be taking include:

• Firewalls around your critical data
• Encryption where applicable
• Carefully controlled access to data
• Capturing all access attempts to protected data

To protect big data properly, companies need security models with high visibility and real-time monitoring and analysis. Consider the following upgrades to network security to help you monitor in real-time:

• TAPs (Test Access Port) – These allow you to listen in to network traffic and see the packets moving through the network without disrupting them. Taps give you visibility of the network, at all layers of the network. Tap systems can help you analyze data for loss and even help you improve efficiency.

• Aggregation – Grouping of similar data together for the purpose of correlating disparate events into a single network “story”, discovery of patterns in traffic, and determining if deeper errors and trends exist.

• Data Filtering – Make sure all data packets are tracked and by filtering them, and therefore reducing the amount of data that needs to be analyzed and increasing the probability of discovering malicious activities through the myriad of data moving through the network..

Protecting big data is in many ways like protecting any data but with more challenges. Greater visibility and real-time monitoring is a higher priority because with big data, there’s so much more to lose and the stakes are higher. Your company needs to know now, not in five days or five months if you’ve been breached. You need to do all you can to protect your big data, your clients, customers, vendors, yourselves.