Fujitsu, eBay Lead Big Data Privacy Research Group

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), a nonprofit organisation focused on best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing, and information and communication technology specialist Fujitsu Laboratories of America, announced the launch of the Big Data Working Group.

The BDWG will address the need for collaborative research and solutions to big data security challenges. Sreeranga Rajan of Fujitsu Laboratories of America chairs the organisation alongside co-chairs Neel Sundaresan of eBay and Wilco Van Ginkel of Verizon.

Security and privacy research

The BDWG’s investigation is planned to lead to crystallisation of best practices for security and privacy in big data, help industry and government on adoption of best practices, establish liaisons with other organisations 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.

The group looks to provide research and guides on six specific themes, including big data-scale cryptography, cloud infrastructure, data analytics for security, framework and taxonomy, policy and governance and privacy.

“Every day 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are being created, resulting in a myriad number of data security and cloud-computing security concerns,” Sreeranga Rajan, director of software systems innovation at Fujitsu Laboratories said in a press statement. “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 health care and their first research report, expected to be released in the autumn, will identify the new and fundamentally different technical and organisational problems when addressing big data security and privacy.

Standards creation

Additional reports will tackle the issues of establishing security and privacy test beds to help strengthen security and privacy of big data cloud platforms, specific actionable information for big data security and privacy, and creating standards for big data security and privacy best practices.

“As a recognised 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,” Yasunori Kimura, president and chief executive of Fujitsu Laboratories of America, said in a prepared statement. “We invite companies from around the world facing big data challenges to join us in this important research effort.”

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