Cloud Security Alliance Releases New Big Data Taxonomy Report

Big Data Working Group Issues Comprehensive Report to Aid Understanding and Decision Making in Big Data Technology

San Jose, CA – September 18, 2014 – CSA Congress 2014 - The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Big Data Working Group today released the Big Data Taxonomy Report, a new guidance report that aims to help decision makers understand and navigate the myriad choices within the big data designation, including data domains, compute and storage infrastructures, data analytics, visualization, security and privacy. Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created - 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. The issues of storing, computing, security, privacy and analytics are all magnified by the velocity, volume, and variety of big data, such as large-scale cloud infrastructures, diversity of data sources and formats, streaming nature of data acquisition and high volume inter-cloud migration. Big data infrastructure and methodology continue to evolve at a fast pace, but the underlying technologies were, in many cases, invented many years ago. In an effort to help IT decision makers make better, more informed choices associated with these technologies, the CSA Big Data Working Group has created a 40-page guidance report that outlines the six dimensions that arise from the key aspects needed to establish a big data infrastructure. The big data taxonomy includes data domains, compute infrastructure, storage infrastructure, analytics, visualization, security and privacy. “All ‘data’ is not equivalent, yet we often find users treating all data components similarly, as they are uncertain as to how to address issues such as latency, or structured verses unstructured data,” said Sreeranga Rajan, chair of the Big Data Working Group. “We hope this report brings clarity to the big data taxonomy, and provides much needed education to help users make better decisions in their own environments.” In the report, each domain is categorized according to how data arises to help decision makers understand the infrastructure choices and requirements for particular types of data. The report also addresses each particular domain in which data arises, to help organizations determine the types of architecture that will be required to store it, process it, and perform analytics on it. Rajan goes on to add, “The greatly increased digitization of human activity and machine-to-machine communications, combined with large-scale, inexpensive hardware, is making practical many previously academic ideas of parallel and distributed computing, along with new considerations necessary to make them even more useful in real world applications.” The Big Data Taxonomy Report is a result of the CSA Big Data working group, chaired by Sreeranga Rajan of Fujitsu, and co-chaired by Neel Sundaresan of eBay
and Wilco van Ginkel of Verizon. To access the report visit https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/download/big-data-taxonomy/. Individuals interested in becoming part of the working group can visit https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/research/big-data/ Cloud Security Alliance Congresses continue to be the industry’s premier gathering for IT security professionals and executives who must further educate themselves on the rapidly evolving subject of cloud security. In addition to offering best practices and practical solutions for remaining secure in the cloud, CSA Congresses give attendees exposure to industry-specific case studies that will help them learn and leverage best practices used by their peers in moving to a secure cloud. About the Cloud Security Alliance
 The Cloud Security Alliance is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within Cloud Computing, and to provide education on the uses of Cloud Computing to help secure all other forms of computing. The Cloud Security Alliance is led by a broad coalition of industry practitioners, corporations, associations and other key stakeholders. For further information, visit us at www.cloudsecurityalliance.org, and follow us on Twitter @cloudsa. Contact Kari Walker for the CSA ZAG Communications 703.928.9996 [email protected]