INFINITE DANGERS TO INFINITE DATA
UMUC

Two point five quintillion bytes of data are generated daily across the cyber world(Mora et al., 2012). With the expansion and capability to generate and store data so much so that 90% of the data stored has been generated in the last two years. (Mora et al., 2012) With the sheer volume of the data that exists and speed at which new data is generated the ability of organizational IT Staffs to meet the security and privacy requirements is being pushed to the limits. With the capability of data mining algorithms to gather and correlate such large volumes of data at such speeds there exists the potential for extreme privacy and ethical concerns; as companies become experts at slicing and dicing data to reveal details as personal as mortgage defaults and heart attack risks, the threat of egregious privacy violations grows(Waxer, 2013). The requirements to maintain the privacy and security of these vast amounts of data are both ethically and legally mandated.
What are the available tool sets that are accessible to an organizations IT Staff to secure databases from intrusion and exploitation? This is of extreme importance when dealing with the volume of data that exists and the personal and private nature of so much information. There are concerns over Personally Identifiable Information (PII) as well as Personal Health Information (PHI); unauthorized access to these could lead to identity theft through the access to PII or misuse of information to deny services due to PHI.
What are the best practices that the IT staff and users should be implementing to ensure security of their data base information? The IT Staff and users of an organization both have a stake in ensuring that their equipment is secure from threats such as environmental, cyber intrusion and exploitation. Generally people focus on the equipment,