The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and Fujitsu Laboratories of America announced launch of the Big Data Working Group which will take industry ownership in addressing the need for collaborative research and solutions to today’s big data security challenges.


Chaired by Sreeranga Rajan of Fujitsu Laboratories of America with co-chairs Neel Sundaresan of eBay and Wilco Van Ginkel of Verizon, the CSA Big Data Working Group will work to address the security and privacy issues magnified today 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.

“As a recognized leader in development and deployment of large scale cloud infrastructures, we are pleased to work with our fellow members at the CSA to develop best practices and standards for big data security and privacy,” said Yasunori Kimura, President and CEO of Fujitsu Laboratories of America. “We invite companies from around the world facing big data challenges to join us in this important research effort.”

Specifically, the CSA Big Data Working Group will be identifying scalable techniques for data-centric security and privacy problems. In doing so the group will look to crystallize the best practices for security and privacy in big data, help industry and governments with adoption of best practices, establish liaisons with other organizations in order to coordinate the development of big data security and privacy standards, and accelerate the adoption of novel research aimed to address security and privacy issues.

To address the large number of issues tied to big data security and privacy, the group will look to provide research and guides on six specific themes:

• Big data-scale crypto
• Cloud infrastructure
• Data analytics for security
• Framework and taxonomy
• Policy and governance
• Privacy

“Everyday 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are being created resulting in a myriad number of data security and cloud-computing security concerns,” said Sreeranga Rajan, Director of Software Systems Innovation at Fujitsu Laboratories of America. “By collaborating as a global community of thought leaders and researchers, we are not only looking to help the industry overcome these challenges but also to leverage new opportunities for the monitoring and detection of security threats enabled by big data.”

The group’s immediate focus will be to develop an experimental platform of test data sets from different industry verticals such as e-commerce and healthcare. The group’s first research report, due out this fall, will identify the new and fundamentally different technical and organizational problems when addressing big data security and privacy.

Future planned reports include a focus on providing specific actionable information for big data security and privacy, creating standards for big data security and privacy best practices, and establishing security and privacy test beds to help strengthen security and privacy of big data cloud platforms.