LEF perspectives: The challenge of trusting data
The DXC Digital Directions series of papers provides insights into achieving new levels of innovation, productivity and investment as companies scale their digital efforts.
Read an excerpt below from the position paper, Rethink risk and enterprise security in a digital world.
We are living in a world of explosive data growth, and yet we are moving into a period where this data is coming more and more under question. In the consumer space, fake news is the latest paradigm driving this distrust. How can we trust what we are reading even when it looks as if it is coming from an authoritative source?
This challenge in a business context is equally scary. Just as organizations are learning to open themselves up to external data sources, open data sets, data feeds from third parties and data streams from devices, so too should they be thinking about how to ensure the provenance of that data.
When you combine this with the insatiable need of machine learning to have as much data as possible to learn and continually improve, things can get even more worrisome. Imagine replacing core business processes with those of an artificial intelligence (AI) that is making decisions on your behalf or dealing with customers in real-time scenarios, all based on the information the AI has been given to train its models. What if that information contains a bias that could lead to poor decisions or unethical behavior? What if a bad actor gets access to the data, or to the data ingest point, and is able to substitute your data with his or hers? This puts the bad actor in a very powerful position, with an ability to quickly change the behavior of your AI systems and, most likely, not for outcomes you’d want to be remembered for.
Adversarial data is and should be a concern to any company looking to rely on any forms of data. Ensuring the provenance of data is something that should be factored into any data exchange relationship. Could blockchain be the answer here? Quite possibly. But today the technology is too slow to allow fast “fluidity” of data through a system so that data can be used in real-time analysis. But for slower types of data, blockchain could well prove to be a good starting point to evolving a solution.
The balance of data fluidity and provenance of data is a hard one to get right. This challenge will drive an abundance of innovation in the coming years, to help organizations and individuals trust the data and information they are receiving.
Continue reading the position paper, Rethink risk and enterprise security in a digital world.
Leading Edge Forum (LEF) is DXC Technology’s independent cross-industry think tank.