- Health-care data need to be secure because of privacy reasons.
- Personal financial data need to be secure because of theft and personal loss.
- Corporate financial data need to be secure because of insider trading laws.
- Corporate activity needs to be secure because of the need to keep trade secrets actually secret.
- And so forth.
There are a multitude of reasons why certain data need to be treated with the utmost of
care when it comes to security.
Fig. 9.3.3 shows the need for security.
Fig. 9.3.3 Security is always an issue.There are many facets to security. Only a few of them will be mentioned here. The
simplest (and one of the most effective) form of security is that of encryption. Encryption
is the process of taking data and substituting encrypted values for actual values. For
example, you might take the text “Bill Inmon” and substitute “Cjmm Jmopm” in its
place. In this case, we have merely substituted the next letter in the alphabet for the
actual value. It would have taken a good cryptographer about a nanosecond to decrypt
the data. But a good encryption analyst could figure out many more ways to encrypt the
data that would stump even the most sophisticated of analysts.
In any case, the process of encrypting data is commonly used. Typically, fields of data
are encrypted inside a database. In health care, for example, only the identifying
information is encrypted. The remaining data are left untouched. This allows the data to
be used in research without endangering the privacy of the data.
Fig. 9.3.4 shows encryption being done on a field of data.
Chapter 9.3: Repetitive Analysis