The Big Debate: Event Security

External data is data sourced from outside the organisation and can be either public – and free to access from, for example, the government – or proprietary, where information is collected and owned by a third party. For the latter, third parties can range from a research agency to a commercial partner, and typically they make data available on a paid-access basis.

The age of big data has been created by the ability of technology to track almost everything we do, not just digitally but in the ‘real-world’ too; consumers are not necessarily producing more data, we are just able to capture more of it than ever before and do so from across an ever-widening range of sources. ‘Datafication’ is the term most used to describe this shift.