In today's
digital age, cyber security is as crucial, if not more so, as actual
security guarding a real piece of company property. However they may
differ, they both have safeguard strategies that need to be carried out
to the letter to be effective.
There is a critical need to securely store, manage, share and analyze massive amounts
of complex (e.g., semi-structured and unstructured) data to determine patterns and trends
in order to improve the quality of healthcare, better safeguard the nation and explore
alternative energy. The emerging cloud computing model attempts to handle massive amounts
of data. Google has now introduced the MapReduce framework for processing large amounts
of data on commodity hardware. Apache’s Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS) is emerging
as a superior software component for cloud computing combined with integrated parts such
as MapReduce. However, state of the art cloud computing systems are not sufficient due to
the fact that (i) they do not provide adequate security mechanisms to protect sensitive
data and (ii) they do not have the capability to process massive amounts of semantic web
and geospatial data. Here is an interesting and useful resource on Cyber Security research