With the increasing use of public cloud technologies, much of our digital footprint lies outside of our own organisations. As an individual, your personal contributions include transactions such as your email traffic, Internet search history, those geotagged images you take on your smartphone and share through social media sites, your retail purchases, loyalty program transactions, payments and road toll payments, to name but a few.
In addition to data generated by individuals, private, public and government organisations across sectors such as healthcare, research, government and scientific agencies, along with myriad other sources, generate rivers of data that eventually flow into the various data centres dotted around the globe. And that’s just the start.
Consider for a moment just one of the latest major scientific endeavours, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Telescope, a state-of-the-art radio telescope currently in development in Australia and South Africa.
Once operational, the SKA is expected to produce data equivalent to between 10 and 100 times the traffic of the entire Internet, and will require the equivalent processing power of about a hundred million PCs. For data to be regarded as ‘big’, conventional thinking is that it should contain three key attributes – volume, velocity and variety. But there is another, arguably more important missing attribute, value, which should also be added to this list.
Data alone is of limited intrinsic value. Only when the disparate array of data sources is merged, consolidated, analysed and interpreted does its potential value emerge. For instance, climate records, geographic and population census data, medical records and other data sources could be used to identify and predict the trends of specific diseases.
For astute businesses, realising the potential value of relevant, timely and accurate information stitched together from a range of sources can not only help fuel innovation, but can also be a real differentiator in how you manage and service your customers.
Keeping your privates private
There are multiple information management challenges for CIOs to heed along the way, however. To comply with relevant privacy legislation, data that is to be externally released for purposes such as marketing, analysis and reporting should have the individual’s personal information removed – a process known as anonymising or de-identifying. But when disparate data from a range of anonymised, independent data sources can be matched using specialised algorithms, it has already been shown that re-identify data is possible.
The risks associated with the possible re-identification of personal information should be high on the agenda for industry regulators, legislators and those concerned about information security and privacy.
The lawlessness of big data
Using overseas cloud computing providers to store and manage large data sets also introduces the well-known and much discussed additional complexity of international data residency legislation.
Added to this is the key topic of governance. Managing, analysing and interpreting big data involves the merging of disparate data sources to newly created, consolidated data sets. A number of questions arise over the governance and security of these new data sets, such as who owns, or has title to, these newly created, aggregated data sets? Who decides what access controls should be applied and in which legal jurisdiction?
We should also never ignore the fact big data presents a rich target of opportunity for cybercriminals. Globally, cybercrime is a multi-billion dollar business with some of the smartest brains employed to crack security systems. Put simply, there is an ongoing arms race between the cloud providers and the cybercriminals and sometimes the latter win.
As a CIO, you are uniquely positioned to help your organisation make the most of the value of its own and other’s associated data, as understanding organisational taxonomies is at the core of enterprise information technologies, cloud or otherwise.
The question is: Is your organisation ready to drink from the fire hydrant of big data?
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Rob Livingstone
Quelle/Source: CIO, 17.06.2013
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