Security News > 2021 > January > 5 data categories to learn for faster cybersecurity responses
You may know where your data is, but do you also know what the data consists of? "Imagine you're at a party. You ask someone you've just met what they do for a living, and they answer: 'I work in data,'" said Sky Cassidy, CEO of MountainTop Data, in an email interview.
Cassidy, familiar with the vagaries of data collection and its usage, is on a quest to make sense of what he calls misunderstood data.
Cassidy's point is that knowing what's inside the container called data is vitally important to those who use the data and those who manage the data when considering data security.
To get everyone on the same page when talking about data, Cassidy uses the following categories of data.
"The data collected over time on a single shopper through their use of a rewards card or something similar would not be considered big data, but that same data on every shopper in the US would be big data," he said.
Analytics: Cassidy said analytics is not a data category; it's a process for analyzing raw data in order to make conclusions about that information, which in a sense is moving from the vague term data to specific components that have real value.