Data is an asset to any organization. In this millennium, large companies such as Google have shown that gathering data and analyzing it can in itself be a product that can lead to an extremely successful business. This demonstration led to an explosion in data-driven decision-making for businesses and personalized experiences for the consumer. Data essentially became a high-value property for an organization. Just like any other asset, data needs to be protected.

Data security is the area that looks into protection of data. Security threats to data can come from outside the organization or from within it. Data theft is one of the highest reported cyber crimes. Recent studies have shown that data security threats are more common from within the organization, either by disgruntled personnel or inadvertently by benign users. A security feature such as authorization has become a baseline security feature for any data product.

In this chapter, we will look at the following...