I agree that “Data security and compliance remain in the front of businesses’ minds when it comes to Big Data.”

My view is to reach the goal of securing the data while preserving its value for analytics, the data itself must be protected at as fine-grained a level as possible.

Securing individual fields allows for the greatest flexibility in protecting sensitive identifying fields while allowing nonidentifying information to remain in the clear.

By protecting data at a very fine-grained level—fields or even part(s) of a field—we can continue to reap the benefits of data monetization while putting forth a significant barrier to data theft.

I talk more about this issue here (http://www.sramanamitra.com/2014/10/03/thought-leaders-in-big-data-ulf-mattsson-cto-of-protegrity-part-1/ )

Ulf Mattsson, CTO Protegrity