- [Narrator] Data is often an organization's
most valuable asset.
As such, it's appropriate
that information security professionals
spend a large amount of their time
ensuring the confidentiality, integrity,
and availability of information assets.
When security professionals begin thinking
about data security, they normally start
thinking about the security controls
used to protect data in two different states:
data at rest and data in motion.
Data at rest is data stored somewhere for later use.
This might be on a hard drive or a USB stick,
in a cloud service or on a magnetic tape
as part of a backup or archival solution.
Data at rest is vulnerable to theft
if an attacker gains either physical or logical access
to the storage media.
This might be by stealing a hard drive
or hacking into an operating system
that has the drive mounted.
Either method can be an effective way
to steal data, and information security professionals
must protect against both approaches.
Data in motion is data that is moving around
the network between two systems.
It might be data moving from a storage location
to a user's computer or data that is simply
being transmitted between two systems,
such as a user entering their credit card number
into a website or sending an email message.
Data in motion must be protected
against eavesdropping attacks
because this data often travels
over public networks such as the internet.
There are several things that you can do
to protect your organization's data.
First, you should have clear policies
and procedures surrounding the appropriate use of data
and the security controls that must be in place
for sensitive information.
Second, you should use encryption
to protect sensitive information
when it is either at rest or in transit.
Different types of encryption
are appropriate for different environments.
You might use file encryption
to protect the data stored on a device
while transport layer security
might protect information being exchanged
between two systems over a network.
Finally, you should use access controls
to restrict access to information
while it is stored on devices.
You can use file system access control lists
to specify who may view, modify,
or delete information stored on a device.
We'll talk about each of these data security controls
in the next few videos of this course.
One final note on data security.
Many organizations are now beginning programs
around the acquisition and analysis of big data.
Simply defined, big data is the use of datasets
that are much larger than those
used by conventional data processing
and analytic techniques.
For example, big data rarely uses
relational databases because
of the significant overhead involved.
Instead, big data storage and analysis
uses specialized technology
like the key value stores of NoSQL databases.
Big data storage and analysis
introduces unique security concerns.
Administrators must think about how this data is secured
and the appropriate access to sensitive information,
especially that concerning
personally identifiable information.