Big Data , Data Governance and Ethics
DR. NNAMDI OGBUKE, PhD, MBA, BSc
Email: [Link]@[Link]
Big Data, Data Governance and Ethics
• Understanding of Big Data
• Characteristics of Big Data
• Data Governance
• Data Security/Ethics
• Digital impacts on Society and Solutions
What is Big Data?
• Put simply, big data is larger, more complex data sets,
especially from new data sources. These data sets are
so voluminous that traditional data processing software
just can’t manage them.
• But these massive volumes of data can be used to
address business problems you wouldn’t have been
able to tackle before.
• Generally Big Data refers to massive amount of business data
(volume) from a wide variety of sources (variety), much of
which is available in real time (velocity), much of which is
uncertain or unpredicted (veracity), and provides insights for
Characteristics of Big Data
Volume – The name Big Data itself is
related to a size which is enormous.
Size of data plays a very crucial role
in determining value out of data. Also,
whether a particular data can actually
be considered as a Big Data or not,
is dependent upon the volume of data.
Hence, 'Volume' is one characteristic
which needs to be considered while dealing with
Big Data.
Characteristics of Big Data
• Variety - refers to heterogeneous sources
and the nature of data, both structured and
unstructured. During earlier days, spreadsheets
and databases were the only sources of data
considered by most of the applications. Nowadays,
data in the form of emails, photos, videos, monitoring
devices, PDFs, audio, etc. are also being considered in
the analysis applications. This variety of unstructured
data poses certain issues for storage, mining and analysing data.
Characteristics of Big Data
• Velocity - The term 'velocity' refers to the speed
of generation of data. How fast the data is generated
and processed to meet the demands, determines real
potential in the data.
• Big Data Velocity deals with the speed at which data
flows in from sources like business processes, application
logs, networks, and social media sites, sensors, Mobile
devices, etc. The flow of data is massive and continuous.
Characteristics of Big Data
• Variability - This refers to the inconsistency which can
be shown by the data at times, thus hampering the
process of being able to handle and manage the data
effectively.
Examples and Use Cases Big Data in Business Operations
• Following are some the examples of Big Data-
• The New York Stock Exchange generates about
one terabyte of new trade data per day.
• Facebook: 500+terabytes of new data get ingested
into the databases of social media site Facebook,
every day. This data is mainly generated in terms
of photo and video uploads, message exchanges, putting comments etc
Examples and Use Cases of Big Data in Business Operations
Social Media
42,033,600,000 Facebook logins per month 159,840,000,000 Google searches per month
1,641,600,000,000 WhatsApp msgs sent/month 8,078,400,000,000 emails sent per month
1,641,600,000,000 Whats App msgs sent/month
8,078,400,000,000 emails sent per month
140 million hours watched on Netflix per day ~= 100,000
hours per minute
Data Governance and Policies
• What is Data Governance?
• It is the practices of ingesting, processing,
securing and storing an organisation's data, were
it is then utilized for strategic decision-making to
improve business outcomes.
Data Governance
Understanding of Data Governance:
• Discovery
• Classification
• Policy
• Rules
• Meta Data
• Automation and Monetization
Benefits of Data Governance:
• Data Governance:
• Drives scale and data literacy
• Ensure security, data privacy and compliance
• Provide high-quality data
• Promote data analytics
• It encompasses a set of rules such as:
• mandates, sub-mandates, regulations, requirements,
Importance of Data Governance
• Data Governance:
• Promotes Big Data and digital transformation
• Increases new data sources, such as IoT
• Reduce data silos
• Ensure compliance and security, and data access
Data Data Security and Ethics
• Ethics refers to a set of principles of right conducts or theory or systems of moral values
• One can consider ethical behaviour as “doing what is right” according to the standards of society.
This, of course, begs the question “of whose society” as what might be considered ethical
behaviour in one culture (country, religion, and ethnicity) might not be so in another.
• Laws can be considered as simply enforcing certain ethical behaviours.
this leads to two familiar ideas: what is ethical is legal and what is
unethical is illegal.
• Ethical codes of practice help determine whether specific laws should be introduced.
• Ethics fills the gap between the time when technology creates new problems and the time when
Security and Privacy issues
• The need in some organizations to identify multiple security
levels and to categorize the data and users based on these
classifications - for example, top secret, secret, confidential,
and unclassified. The security policy of the organization with
respect to permitting access to various classifications of data
must be enforced.
• Threats to databases can result in the loss or degradation of
some or all of the following commonly accepted security
goals: integrity, availability, and confidentiality.
Threats to Databases:
• Loss of Integrity - Database Integrity refers to how the information
can be protected from improper modifications:
• creating, inserting, updating data, changing the status, and deleting
• Loss of Confidentiality - Databases Confidentiality refers to
the protection of data from unauthorised disclosure.
The impacts can range from:
• violation of Data Privacy, to the Jeopardization of National
Security
• Loss of Availability - refers to making data available to a
human user or a programme who/which has a legitimate right
to these data.
Quick Solutions/Control Measures
To protect databases against any types of threats, it is common to implement four
kinds of control measures:
• Access control
• Flow control
• Data encryption
Access Control
A security problem common to computer systems is that of
preventing unauthorized persons from accessing the system
itself, either to obtain information or to make malicious changes
in a portion of the database. The security mechanism of a
DBMS must include provisions for restricting access to the
database system as a whole. This function, called access control,
is handled by creating user accounts and passwords to control
the login process by the DBMS.
Flow control and Data encryption
• Flow control: Another security issue is that of flow control,
which prevents information from flowing in such a way that it
reaches unauthorized users. Channels or pathways information
flow implicitly in way that violate the security policy of an
organization are called covert channels.
• Data encryption: A final control measure is data encryption,
which is used to protect sensitive data (such as credit card
numbers) that is transmitted via some type of communications
network. Encryption can be used to provide additional
protection for sensitive portions of a database as well. The data
is encoded using some coding algorithm. An unauthorized user
who accesses encoded data will have difficulty deciphering it,
but authorized users are given decoding or decrypting
algorithms (or keys) to decipher the data. Encrypting techniques
that are very difficult to decode without a key have been
Regulations - Self regulation
Strong regulations on the part of government to checkmate the intrusive and
invasive power of this new technologies which some business owners leverage
on, without comprising the opportunities it offers to the society.
Including the issues of job loss/job gain controversy
Downsides of Digital technologies
• Changes in jobs human do/job automation
• Al-enabled terrorism – autonomous drones, robotics
swarms, and remote and nanorobot attacks
• Social manipulations and AI bias
• Deepfakes – creating of ‘fakes news’ fake videos of real
people
• Environmental issues
Thank You
Reviewing Academic Literature
Understanding Big Data and Big Data Analytics
The Merits
Impacts/applications of Big Data Analytics and other digital technologies on industries and
in business operations
The demerits
Ethical, Privacy and Security issues posed to society and businesses
Quick solutions to the ethical, security and privacy concerns
Tutorial : Academic Literature on Big Data Analytic,
Technology and Ethics
From the readings of the academic articles, respond to the
questions below:
Explain the use cases of Big Data Analytics on
Businesses
State the ethical, security and privacy challenges of digital technologies
on
Society?
Identify from the articles four quick solutions that will address these
challenges