INTRODUCTION

In the age of disruption, big data is a powerful catalyst for businesses to achieve tangible growth. It helps corporations track consumer behavior, measure efficiency and forecast market trends. When leveraged correctly, the actionable insights gleaned from big data can dramatically increase a company's bottom line.

As more and more corporations are turning to data driven-solutions to drive business growth, the value of said data becomes more evident to cybercriminals. In turn, cases of data theft and exploitation have become rampant across several industries. Where there is money, there will be crime. As more companies harness the power of big data and integrate cloud-based computing with their on-premise IT infrastructure, they risk making themselves more vulnerable to increasingly innovative hacks.

With the current state of cybersecurity in flux, data centers are bolstering their efforts to protect valuable information from being hacked. Data center operators such as Alibaba Cloud are adopting more sophisticated strategies to guard data from being breached. A report from Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that the cybersecurity market will be worth US$120 billion by this year1. That same report predicts that by 2021, the global market will have spent US$1 trillion on cybersecurity initiatives.