Securing data at rest is already a challenge. So what about data on the move? Without such protections, events like this Steam security flaw can happen to any business.

“Security is always a difficult topic. It means so many things to so many people,” said Ion Stoica, executive chairman at Databricks Inc. and professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley.

The cloud can be as secure as on-premises storage, but still the state of security is not that great, Stoica stated. Fortunately, there is some interesting research and new technologies that give the security field some hope.

To learn more about security and uses of moving data, Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile live-streaming studio, spoke to Stoica during Spark Summit East 2017 in Boston. (* Disclosure below.)

Taking action, staying secure

The conversation opened with a look at the value of data. “The real value of data is in the decision you can make on the data,” Stoica said. A business wants to make those decisions quickly, on fresh data, and targeted to the situation, he continued. To do this, a company needs to build platforms and tools to use the data. These must be secured.

New security technologies involve learning from the environment, beyond just interacting with it. In a network attack, a business wants to detect, diagnose and defend in real-time, Stoica stated. More data will help the business detect faster, but learning will help discover the patterns that indicate an attack.

These patterns form the foundation of a model for detecting problems, he pointed out. First, a company can look at the effects of an attack; denial of service, computers crashing, and anomalies on the host. Then, they can correlate those clues with their online traffic. From this, they can develop the models to identify what kind of traffic causes what behavior, Stoica explained.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Spark Summit East 2017 Boston. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a media partner at the conference. Neither Databricks nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE