Protegrity CTO and data security expert Ulf Mattsson featured in recent post on One Million by One Million blog. In her recent post, “Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ulf Mattsson, CTO of Protegrity,” Sramana Mitra profiles Protegrity CTO Ulf Mattsson and gets his thoughts on the state of Big Data security today.

1. Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ulf Mattsson, CTO of Protegrity (Part 4)
By Sramana Mitra, One Million by One Million Blog
Ulf Mattsson: We’ve seen studies talking about how Big Data analytics can revolutionize the
way the Internet did many years ago. I’ve seen figures saying that 63% are using it to
enhance customer relationships, 58% are using these capabilities to redefine the product and
product development, and 56% are using it to change their operations. These create a lot of
opportunities but, at the same time, open up privacy issues. According to recent reports and
studies, 51% are saying that security is the most important issue. The monetization of data and
data breaches are driving the need for security.
Most of Big Data is based on Hadoop and Hadoop is introducing new system layers for security.
Traditional security approaches are not working because they are typically based on some kind
of control in-boxing or choke point. You need to know where the data is. If you box it in and
build walls around the it, Big Data will not work because Big Data is based on data moving
around between the different nodes. It’s very high performance so you cannot use your
traditional parameters of security. So, you to address not just the issue of Big Data where you
have the new security approach but also the data flow.
What is recognized as a big issue recently by Gartner is that we actually have different silos in
the enterprise. We have different islands of legacy systems that are feeding data into Big Data.
You have enterprise warehouses that are using the data from Big Data. It’s again about the data
flow. Gartner is pointing to breaching the silos as a cryptic way to solve the security problem
going forward. When they talk about breaching these silos, they are referring to an enterprise
policy. Your security policy would, on an enterprise level, control it from a single point instead
of point solutions for each silo.
These enterprise policies should then be automatically enforced on these different silos and
platforms. We use the term “bridging the gap” for this where you can actually be compliant and
protect privacy, and at the same time use the data. With traditional security approaches, you tend
to lock down the data and then the data will not be available for analysis. You need to use
another approach.
What Gartner is also acknowledging is that you need to think about the granularity. If you have a
more granular way to protect different data and different feeds, then you can adjust the
protection. You get the balance between security and utility. You actually can use your data for
analytics and still be compliant and have control over the protection.
This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ulf Mattsson, CTO of
Protegrity