Securing Big Data Part 5 - your Big Data Security team

What does your security team look like today?

Or the IT equivalent, "the folks that say no".  The point is that in most companies information security isn't actually something that is considered important.  How do I know this?  Well because basically most IT Security teams are the equivalent of the nightclub bouncers, they aren't the people who own the club, they aren't as important as the barman, certainly not as important as the DJ and in terms of Nightclub strategy their only input will be on the ropes being set up outside the club.

If Information is actually important then information security is much more than a bunch of bouncers trying to keep undesirables out.  Its about the practice of information security and the education of information security,  in this Information security is actually a core part of Information Governance and Information Governance is very much a business led thing.

Big Data increases the risks of information loss, because fundamentally you are not only storing more information you are centralizing more information which means more inferences can be made, more links made and more data stolen.  This means that historical thefts which stole data from a small number of systems risk being dwarfed by Big Data hacks which steal huge sets or even runs algorithms within a data lake and steals the results.

So when looking at Big Data security you need to split into three core groups

The point here is that this governance is exactly the same as your normal Data governance, its essential that Information Security becomes a foundation element of information governance.  The three different parts of governance are set up because there are different focuses

1. Standards - sets the gold standard of what should be achieved
2. Policy - sets what can be achieved right now (which may not meet the gold standard)
3. KPI Management - tracks compliance to the gold standard and adherence to policy

The reason these are not just a single group is that the motivations are different.  Standards groups set up what would be ideal, its against this ideal that progress can be tracked.  If you combine Standards groups with Policy groups you end up with Standards which are 'the best we can do right now' which doesn't give you something to track towards over multiple years.

KPI management is there to keep people honest.  This is the same sort of model I talked about around SOA Governance and its the same sort of model that whole countries use, so it tends to surprise me when people don't understand the importance of standards v policy and the importance of tracking and judging compliance independently from those executing.

So your Big Data Security team starts and ends with the Information Governance team, if information security isn't a key focus for that team then you aren't considering information as important and you aren't worried about information security.

Other Parts in the series

1. Securing Big Data is about layers
2. Use the power of Big Data to secure Big Data
3. How maths and machine learning helps
4. Why its how you alert that matters