The rise of the cloud didn’t free us from concerns over who stores our data. Where matters, and major cloud providers and big data monopolies host a huge percentage of the world’s data. Thousands of organizations that store and manage personal, business and government data use big-name cloud providers. Smartphone platform companies house and process terabytes of the data that flows through mobile networks. Social networks house and control the data on billions of people worldwide — certainly the personal data of effectively all employees in your company.
And, that creates challenges, too. For example, cyber criminals and state-sponsored threat actors find data held in a central hub a tempting target. It’s time for a wider conversation among security specialists and industry leaders about how to better protect this data. Let’s take a look at the risks and challenges of a big data monopoly.