Six months after identifying an initial set of technical and organizational problems around big data and privacy, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Big Data Working Group recently released an expanded top 10 list security challenges.

The report, entitled “Expanded Top Ten Big Data Security and Privacy Challenges,” includes a bigger list of challenges from those outlined and presented at CSA Congress last November. It addresses three newly defined issues: modeling, analysis and implementation.

“Big data remains one of the most talked about technology trends in 2013,” the CSA explained in a blog post. “But lost among all the excitement about the potential of big data are the very real security and privacy challenges that threaten to slow this momentum.”


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The three new issues outlined in the report are as follows:

1.    Modeling: formalizing a threat model that covers most of the cyber-attack or data-leakage scenarios.

2.    Analysis: finding tractable solutions based on the threat model.

3.    Implementation: implanting the solution in existing infrastructures.

The CSA maintains that security and privacy issues are magnified by the “three V’s” of big data, which are velocity, volume and variety.

“These factors include variables such as large-scale cloud infrastructures, diversity of data sources and formats, streaming nature of data acquisition and the increasingly high volume of inter-cloud migrations,” the post continued.

The “Expanded Top 10 Big Data Security Challenges” report can bedownloaded in its entirety here.

Big data and cloud pushed enterprise software spending to $342 billion in 2012, but the market is now going through a period of slower growth, according to the latest data from IDC (News - Alert).

Last year, the worldwide software market grew 3.6 percent, confirming IDC’s previous forecast of a more conservative growth period compared to 2010 and 2011. However, within the overall market there are faster growing segments. Data access, analysis and delivery, collaborative applications, CRM applications, security software and systems and network management software all grew between 6 and 7 percent in that time – about double the rate for enterprise software overall.