"Big data" is the logical outgrowth of increased use of virtualization technology, cloud computing and data center consolidation. What organizations are finding as they centralize resources like storage is that they've produced quite a lot of data -- in some cases, even exabytes of data. We're seeing scenarios play out where traditional security tools no longer provide the kind of value they have historically.
Over the past few decades, most IT shops have followed a somewhat similar trajectory: Starting from a centralized model (i.e., the mainframe days), computing resources, much like the cosmological Big Bang, have exploded outwards to become ever-more-distributed and decentralized. This makes sense given market dynamics. Computing platforms evolve quickly, so monolithic computing platforms that require heavy up-front investment are less efficient from a depreciation standpoint (i.e., from a MIPS per dollar per year point of view) than numerous, incremental investments in lower-powered devices.
So it's natural that processing would decentralize. And in fact, there have been numerous technologies invented over the years to support exactly this paradigm.
By virtue of ever-more decentralized processing, it logically follows that storage would be (in general) decentralized as well. In fact, storage becomes a balancing act. Data is placed in such a way as to be centralized enough to be manageable, while still being distributed enough to be efficiently used by consumers of that data. That's the paradigm of recent history. But this paradigm is changing -- changing in a way that impacts how we manage IT overall from a security perspective. And that change is "big data."
What Is 'Big Data?'
This emerging paradigm -- "big data" -- is the logical outgrowth of increased use of virtualization technology, cloud computing and data center consolidation. All of these technologies have huge cost and efficiency benefits. And they all also leverage standardization, consolidation and centralization of resources to achieve economies of scale -- part of what makes that cost benefit possible. And what organizations are finding as they deploy these technologies -- centralizing resources like storage along the way -- is that they've produced quite a lot of data ... in some cases, even exabytes of data. To put that into perspective, the total number of words ever spoken by humans is estimated to be around 5 exabytes.
Smart folks (for example, observant engineers and scientists within the social network community) have discovered that having a lot of data in one place opens up opportunities to use that data to a productive purpose; it's apparently an emergent property of large amounts of data. So as the volume of data compounds, so also do opportunities to leverage the data emerge. It's starting to be transformative to business, telling us quite a bit about our customers, about how they use our services, and about how our businesses run in general.
Of course, for those of us who practice security, it goes without saying that this changes the landscape. There are upsides and downsides from a security standpoint to this shift. For example, on the one hand, it's easier to protect data when you know where it is and it's all in the same place; on the other hand, it makes for a bigger target from a hacker perspective. Going into each and every pro and con of big data from a security standpoint would likely take all day, but suffice it to say that the practice of information security as a discipline will change as a result of the transformation going on.
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