Fremont: Along with the increasing universality of technology comes the increase in the amount of data. As the business environment is becoming more complex, companies are searching for alternatives to store, process and analyze large amount of data from social networks, sensors, IT Systems and several other sources. Like a black-hole, the data becomes extremely powerful due in part of its density. But this process of storing and analyzing huge amount of information, called as Big Data, can prove to be at risk.

According to a report, Forrester Research’s “The Future of Data Security and Privacy: Controlling Big Data”, reveals that there can be rife with security risks for the large amount of information stored. It is apparent that the companies that stores such massive data contains significant amount of ‘toxic’ data.

The market of big data is expected to be $70 billion and growing by 15 percent a year. No surprises, as every industry ranging from social media like Facebooks, Twitter, and LinkedIn, blogs, press, Enterprise IT and others are storing a huge data every day. Besides storing intellectual property, big data environments also contain data that companies control but do not own, which includes customer data and business partner data.

The potential of the market is huge, and few VC firms are ready to make their hands dirty in the game. While Accel Partners have launched $100 million fund towards big data, Battery Ventures have made an investment in a stealth big data company Continuuity.

As big data is all about aggregating data across the organization, security and risk, professionals must work to eliminate the silos of data control and responsibilities that exists at the moment. Big data requires exceptional technologies to efficiently process large quantities of data within tolerable elapsed times. Cisco reports that the amount of traffic flowing over the internet will reach 667 exabytes annually by 2013. The impact of big data has increased the demand of information management specialists has also gone high.

However, it is important for these industry leaders to figure out how to cajole order out of the bedlam from all those zeros and ones, as well as optimize return on investment and manage data privacy. Mainly, the organizations that promotes the employees to bring their own device to the work place need to consider a two-prolonged approach to security by focusing on both the device and the data it can access.

However, along with the target-worthiness of the data that is at risk, the size of the data set makes implementing security controls unmanageable. Not only does the data have a huge risk of theft, but the tools required to implement technical security controls at this level are complicated to deploy. This is one of the reasons that pay to think through security controls while the data set grows too large.

Yet another important concern for the industry is that the industry is struggling with getting real value from big data, solely because there is a dearth of knowledgeable workers; those with the skills necessary to analyze and understand what the data is saying; translate the data into real business action that will drive bottom-line results; and communicate recommendations to senior executives.