We are living in a world where Data has acquired immense importance. It is the biggest wealth anyone can have. It is also the biggest and best investment anyone can make. Data is going to be the enabler for whatever you want to do in the future. Data, by itself, is not a new phenomenon. It has always been there in various forms. People used to look at excel sheets at the end of every week/month/quarter to get a retrospective.

However, till the past few years, its real value was confined mostly to the boundary of labs. With the technological advances over the past few years and technologies like cloud being made available to consumers, it has taken a completely different meaning.

Technology has been changing very fast and with it, more and more data is becoming available.
We generate more data every day than the previous day. We can safely say –

  • Data has never been generated so fast till date …
  • Data will never be generated so slow ever …

The above statements will remain true pretty much in the future as well.

All this data is very valuable. Some folks say data is the new oil. Whether it is or not is debatable.

It surely is very very valuable just like Oil …  but it’s different from Oil – in the sense … it is not a resource which reduces on being used. As a matter of fact, using data results in generation of even more data. Every industry now uses data and data has also created industries:

  • Data Processing
  • Data Analytics
  • Data Security
  • Data Compliance
  • Data Protection
  • Data Mobility
  • Data Privacy
  • Data Collection – being some of them.

Each of these domains face ever increasing challenges due to the 4 V’s of data viz. Data Volume, Data Velocity, Data Veracity, Data Variety. While we will continue to see various companies trying to solve multiple challenges in each of the above areas, some things that are common across the board are:

  • Data Ethics
  • Data Privacy and
  • Data Security

Everyone agrees with this, but very few people think about these when building a product.

None of the above can be an afterthought. They have to be an inherent part of the product itself and should be a part of the product development process.

Unfortunately, there is very less awareness about this where it matters the most – the mindset of every engineer. It has to be a part of the mindset of each engineer who is working on the product.

How do we achieve this?

We all learn technologies, but how many of the technical courses (minus the courses explicitly meant for say security) actually teach or even make the students aware of the above aspects?

Simple questions like  –

  • Is the code I am writing fool proof?
  • Can someone inject any code in the code I have written?
  • What would be the consequence if that happens?
  • How do I respond in case of such a scenario?

These and similar questions should be inserted into the minds to anyone who is learning any technology which would be used to build a product. This would be a step in the right direction and will make people aware of these principals. In this blog series, I will try to address some of the above principals so stay tuned and let me know your thoughts in the comments below.