This week at the CeBIT Global Conferences (CGC), Jan Neutze, Director of Cybersecurity Policy in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) gave a keynote presentation on “Cybersecurity in the World of Big Data.”
In his presentation, Neutze outlined the changes cyberspace is undergoing with users coming online rapidly in the BRIC countries and the global South. Many of these users are younger, spend more time online, using mobile devices to experience social networks and apps, and greatly value natural user interfaces. At the same time, the dawn of the “Internet of Things” is creating a cyber-ecosystem in which nearly everything will become connected.
Notwithstanding the incredible opportunities for economic growth which come with cloud, IoT and big data, these developments are also significantly expanding the cyber-attack surface. Unfortunately, this has not escaped cybercriminals, who focus their attacks not just on stealing personal identifiable information (PII) but are beginning to target the hardware, firmware and embedded software as commercial software becomes much harder to attack. Today’s near-permanent communication flows between people, machines and programs is vastly greater than in the early days of the computer era.
Underlining this explosion in data generation, Neutze outlined that 90% of the world’s data had been generated only in the past 2 years. In the enterprise world in particular, the shift to big data is accompanied by adoption of cloud technologies. Soon people will produce 70% of the data, but 80% of data will be stored by enterprises.
To help enterprises measure their IT maturity and weigh the benefits and risks of adopting or expanding cloud services, Microsoft recently developed a “Cloud Security Readiness Tool.” This free tool uses the Cloud Control Matrix (CCM) to consider data security, privacy, and reliability factors as well as key compliance and regulatory standards. The tool is a simple way to adopt Security, Trust, and Assurance Registry (STAR) and CCM principles.
Addressing CeBIT’s main theme “datability” (big data & responsible use) for 2014, Neutze urged that the rapid growth in users, data and connected devices called for a new approach and strategy to cybersecurity, including the need for a broader discussion about how to transfer principles of the physical world into the world of Big Data, asking key questions like:
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Who “owns” a piece of data and what rights come attached with a dataset?
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What defines “fair use” of data?
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And who is responsible for which content and data?
Microsoft is engaged in driving this debate forward!
Photos : Alex Schelbert