Big Data: Opening Way to Vulnerabilities

By CIOReview | Wednesday, February 28, 2018

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The far-reaching benefits of big data that organizations reap have ensured that big data is here to stay for a long time, adding to its sheer volume in the coming years. With the burgeoning IoT devices and the growing AI integrations across the technological domain, the huge cascades of data that are generated and aggregated have posed a number of threats that are difficult to overlook. The path of big data is filled with pitfalls and the riskiest of them is big data security. Businesses today ar

e leveraging the benefits of big data rampantly without scrutinizing the security concerns that it brings along.

As a technological enabler, although big data has endowed organizations with capabilities that they couldn’t acquire before, many platforms that utilize big data don’t have the requisite security enforcements to thwart data breaches. Proper encryption, compliance monitoring, and effective policy management are some built-in security features that are often disregarded by companies and result in a security vulnerability. With sophisticated hackers on the rise, even big organizations aren’t immune to potential hacks. Smaller organizations, on the other hand, are more susceptible to ransomware attacks and more often than not pay huge amount to retrieve the data. What adds to the complexity of big data is the variety of complex data sets and the different forms of data—structured and unstructured. In a digital world where every other appliance and application that is used, produces and accumulates huge amount of data, maintaining the privacy of people becomes indispensable. Big data has introduced organizations and individuals to new opportunities and risks alike.