The FISMA Focus IPD

The group (cloudsecurityalliance.org/research/big-data/) intends to address security and privacy issues that it says have been magnified 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.

Also, it sees potential to use big data technologies to combat security threats. Sreeranga Rajan, director of software systems innovation at Fujitsu Laboratories of America, said: “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 president and CEO of Fujitsu Laboratories of America, Yasunori Kimura, said: “We invite companies from around the world facing big data challenges to join us in this important research effort.”

The group says it will be “identifying scalable techniques for data-centric security and privacy problems…[and] will look to crystallise the best practices for security and privacy in big data, help industry and governments with adoption of best practices, establish liaisons with other organisations 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.”

It 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. Its first research report, due out this northern autumn, will “identify the new and fundamentally different technical and organisational 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.

The Cloud Security Alliance was formed in March 2009 by PGP Corporation, Qualys and Zscaler and has since grown to over 100 members. Complimentary membership is also open to individuals “with an interest in cloud computing and expertise to help make it more secure,” based on a minimum level of participation.

The organisation set up an Asia Pacific arm in February, naming Aloysius Cheang, Trend Micro’s Asia Pacific strategy advisor, as managing director Asia Pacific. The Open Certification Framework was introduced in May. Also in May an Australian chapter of the CSA was formed, at the AusCERT2012 conference.