The Rise of the Data Security Scientist

A new breed of data scientist — professionals focused on protecting data — is emerging. Here’s what the role entails and why the position may be a good addition to your IT team.

All organizations are awash with data. As they’ve explored managing, analyzing, and measuring their data, a new class of professional has arisen: the data scientist. Often a critical member of the business, a data scientist is responsible for developing a full understanding of the data the enterprise creates and consumes daily. Moreover, a data scientist’s work can fuel corporate strategy for effectively managing and analyzing this data to support business decisions.

The work data scientists do every day has become integral to ensuring enterprises remain competitive in crowded marketplaces and are successful in their critical corporate projects (including digital transformations). It can’t be ignored — data scientists are disrupting business processes and decisions in the best possible ways.

Part of my role requires conversations with corporations of all sizes about how to accelerate adoption of data protection strategies that work for them. In these conversations I’ve seen a trend emerge — the inclusion of the data scientist. This underscores a broader trend within IT toward a convergence of data management and data security.

Including data scientists in security decisions has the potential to bring long-overdue disruption to IT security departments. After all, if data scientists can use data to improve business decisions, can’t they do the same for security decisions?

The answer is yes and no. Data science can bring much-needed disruption to IT security decisions, but it must be combined with expertise in other facets of security, including network security, identity and access management, and data protection.

The role of data security scientist mirrors that of a data scientist with one key difference: a laser focus on assessing whether an organization is protecting its most valuable data efficiently and according to regulations or industry standards. Like a data scientist, a data security scientist also looks at the complete life cycle of organizational data — but with a trained, critical eye to security implications at every turn.

This is a critical view that doesn’t exist in every corporation. Data scientists are focused on managing and analyzing data.