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Cyber secure your big data; yes, cyber-secure your big data, it is that simple. Like many things in business and in life, theory is often perceived as much more feasible than it is in reality.

Let's delve into some of the reasons cyber securing your data and big data and its respective elements should become a higher priority for most organizations.

To begin, the most robust end-to-end, high-end security appliance with a state of the art firewall and IPS or Intrusion Prevention System is not enough. A cyber security product that can handle hundreds of thousands of connections per minute running at speeds of tens of gigabits per second on your private network is also insufficient. If your antivirus solution is not up to par, all hell can break loose.

Sometimes a single virus, yes, a SINGLE virus, can manifest its wrath, potentially costing your organization substantial damage and even bankrupting your company in some extreme cases.

Monetary Factor

Before delving into some high-level macro technical related sub topics relating to securing your organization's data, let's delve into the monetary factor. Simply put, money talks, and in this case data talks. Data or better yet documented content talks big bucks yes big bucks, from financial records lost, IP and intellectual property related documents from formulas to patent drafts the list goes on. How about documents needed for the IRS. From inventive blueprints to formulas for groundbreaking medicine, data loss could amount to millions and even billions of dollars' worth of losses. 

Avoid the Breach

Some of the bigger names in cyberspace have tainted their good reputation with record breaking data breaches. In fact, those data breaches are also monetary and reputation breaches to say the least.

Let's list the top 10 breaches of the 21st century here to place some more context about data breaches to remind us of how vulnerable even some of the biggest names can be when caught off-guard. 

1. Yahoo - 3 billion accounts impacted

2. Alibaba - 1.1 billion pieces of user data

3. LinkedIn - 700 million users

4. Sina Weibo - 538million accounts

5. Facebook - 533 million users

6. Marriott International (Starwood) -  500 million customers

7. Yahoo - 500 million accounts  

8. Adult Friend Finder - 412.2 million accounts

9. MySpace- 360 million user accounts

10. NetEase- 235 million user accounts

Resiliency & Security

Resiliency and cyber security are closely related, and this relation should be understood well. As companies rev up the resiliency, they are also revving up security often without realizing it.

Data resiliency means that redundant copies of the same data sets are in different geo cloud locations. If one of those locations experiences a cyber-attack, that location needs to be shut down not just network-wise but even power-wise to mitigate additional damage. The decision to power down a location would most likely be swift as the non-infected locations can still serve end-users and enable optimal business continuity despite the attack.

Encryption

Protecting your data from getting into the wrong hands is one aspect of cyber data security. The other is ensuring that the data will render indiscernible gibberish if it does get into the wrong hands. This is where encryption fits into the more significant data cyber security and, more specifically, the confidentiality puzzle.

Encryption falls into two major categories, which are data at rest and data in transit. Data confidentiality needs to be in place in both cases where the data is just stored on a hard drive or travelling over a packet network.