BIG DATA AND SECURITY CHALLENGES

Bilal Ahmad

Big data security is an umbrella term that includes all security measures and tools
applied to analytics and data processes. Big data is the huge collection of
datasets, from various application sources such as banking, marketing, sales,
social media. The most prominent attributes of Big Data are referred as 3 Vs i.e.
Volume (Amount of Data), Variety (Type or format of Data) and Velocity (Speed or
Rate of Data Processing or Generation). Big data security requires more powerful
tools, appropriate methods and advanced technologies for a rapid data analysis. It
also requires new security management models that handles both internal and
external data.
The biggest challenge for big data from a security point of view is the protection
of user’s privacy. Big data often contains huge amounts of personal identifiable
information, so the privacy of users is a huge concern. Data leakage and data
breach is the major risk in Big Data which threatens the privacy. When producing
information for big data, organizations have to ensure they have the right balance
between utility of the data and privacy. Before the data is stored it should be
adequately anonymized, removing any unique identifier for a user.
Data integrity is another data security challenge in which data changes frequently.
Hackers can access manufacturing systems that use sensors to detect
malfunctions in the processes. After gaining access, hackers make the sensors
show fake results. Challenges like that are usually solved with fraud detection
technologies.
Data mining is a powerful tool in helping better understand and utilize the data a
company owns. Even though this process is handled by professionals, it could still
create big data security concerns that should not be overlooked. Data often
contains personal and financial information for that reason, companies need to
add extra security layers to protect against external and internal threats.
Companies sometimes prefer to restrict access to sensitive data like medical
records that include personal information. But people that do not have access
permission, such as medical researchers, still need to use this data. The solution in
many organizations is to grant granular access. Data encryption is conducted to
minimize the granularity of encryption, as well as for high security, flexibility, and
applicability/relevance.  this technology is limited by the high number of keys and
the complexity of key management. User access control is a basic network
security tool. The lack of proper access control measures can be disastrous for big
data systems. A robust user control policy has to be based on automated role-
based settings and policies to avoid hacking.
 From a security perspective, the major concerns of Big Data are privacy, integrity,
availability, and confidentiality with respect to outsourced data. Large amounts of
data are stored in cloud platforms. However, customers cannot physically check
the outsourced data. Qualifying and validating all of the items in Big Data are
impractical; hence, new approaches must be developed. Different methodologies
from authentication based approaches, encryption to security mechanism which
uses authentication, intrusion, and encryption techniques, should be applied for
the security of data in the cloud.

Refrence: https://www.scnsoft.com/blog/big-data-security-challenges