Data is not the new oil, it is nuclear fuel.

“Data is the new oil” metaphor is known for a long time, but the modern cloud era seems to change our perception.

The citation for metaphor goes back to 2006 and is credited to mathematician Clive Humby — “Data is the new Oil. It’s valuable, but if unrefined, it cannot be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc. to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so must data be broken down, analyzed for it to have value.”

Nobody can argue with that analogy. But the interesting part is that if Clive Humby would have to compare data in 2020, then it would be like nuclear fuel.

In the past decade, data helped to drive business strategies, disrupt the industry, or even helped win the presidential election. No one could ever imagine that.

Data hold that much power if used properly. No doubt that data is now the world’s most valuable asset. In fact, HBR published an article in 2012 titled “Data scientist: The Sexiest Job of 21st Century”. Since then, every organization has attempted to be data-driven, and the majority of them successfully executed that.

How does the perception of data is changing?

Today, we all are witnessing that Data, like Oil, is a power source for the digital world. And those who control it, like Google, Facebook, Amazon, position themselves as the tech giants, just as the oil barons did 100 years ago.

If compared to toe to toe, data can never be like oil. Period. Oil is finite and data is infinite. Data can be reused again and again, but oil is not reusable. The similarity between Data and Oil was on the grounds of “valuable asset”.

The only reason that data can be brought into conversation with oil is only on the grounds of “most valuable asset and vulnerability”.

As organizations started to realize the importance of data for business growth, future predictions, analytics for useful insights, it started replacing Oil (which made fortune for many) as “the most valuable asset.”

Data is like a nuclear fuel

Organizations like Google and Facebook have created their empire leveraging the users’ data in a refined way.

The disturbing aspect of data is that if it is not handled within regulations, then it can create havoc. According to Statista, “ The statistic presents the recorded number of data breaches and records exposed in the United States between 2005 and 2018. In the last measured period, the number of data breaches in the United States amounted to 1,244 with over 446.5 million records exposed.”

Nothing Short of a Chernobyl Disaster (Source: Statista)

Data breaches are not new to the tech industry. The organizations, customers, and even individual users have played the role of a victim. In fact, the average cost of the data breach is $4 million, and the stature setback for an organization is non-recoverable.

Suggested Read: Cloud Cryptography — A foolproof solution for your cloud security

Take the example of Chernobyl Disaster

Nuclear Disaster Illustration

Chernobyl Disaster fits here as the perfect example of how Data is like nuclear fuel. At the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the actions of the operating team led to the worst ever nuclear disaster in the history of human mankind. The team couldn’t control the situation of Uranium leakage due to airburst fuzed nuclear detonation.

The recent Capital One data breach was also due to one of the former employees of Amazon; who exposed their data, which affected more than 100 million people. The devil is in detail, and the overlooked detail in this breach was the origin. The vulnerability arose due to a misconfigured open-source Web Application Firewall (WAF). Capital One was using this WAF as a part of operations hosted in the cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Both incidents were due to internal threats, i.e., ground team or former employee. This is not the only breach that highlighted the most gruesome face of trusting employees with confidential credentials.

Connecting the dots

If the data is not handled properly, it’ll result in havoc and utter chaos. Few of the biggest data breaches happened in the cloud era and that calls for something. Not all of the breaches were due to cloud technologies (we can give credit to hackers, who know their way around in the virtual world), but Capital One’s story puts cloud as the center of attraction that too in a negative way.

Not only data breaches make data fragile, but also it’s misuse. Satya Nadella (CEO, Microsoft) in Microsoft Inspire 2019, said, “You can’t claim trust, you have to earn it each day. We have to treat privacy as a human right.” Yet, the tech giants like Facebook involved in a scandal with Cambridge Analytica to create voter profiles for American citizens without consent. All of this with just data that everybody has already either provided or companies are regularly collecting.

How to avoid such disasters?

Cloud is the new house of data. Nowadays, most of the data based operations take place in cloud, hosted in different regions to achieve low latency and scalability. The only viable solution to safely operate in the data-centric world is regulations and their implementation.

“Cloud is a shared responsibility” and will always be. The user and the cloud providers need to exercise aggressive efforts to update the security measures regularly. The security measures could be understanding new security threats to outsmart hackers, innovative monitoring tools, using secure third-party tools(if any), etc.

If any party overlooks their responsibility, then the confidential data would be exposed and exploited. Businesses that capture the biggest reserves of data hold a sustainable advantage that will leave competitors in the dust. But the same companies are most vulnerable in the virtual world.

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