I’d be remiss if I didn’t touch on the massive data breach at online marketing firm Epsilon.

Obviously, this is a big deal for the company and for its customers, JP Morgan, Walgreens and Target among them. It’s a public relations nightmare for them and Epsilon, in particular, will forever be associated with what could be the biggest data breach in US history.

But the breach should also serve as a wake-up call to big data vendors. When it comes to big data, most of the attention goes to Hadoop, MPP-based data warehouses and other analytics technologies under development. And understandably so. Advances in big data analytics capabilities are changing the way companies do business and consumers interact on the web.

Security, on the other hand, often gets short shrift. But that’s not because it’s necessarily lacking. It’s just a lot more interesting to talk about MapReduce and processing millions of rows of social media data than user authentication and passwords.

But for big data and related analytics technologies to make the jump to the mainstream smoothly, vendors are going to have to reassure the public, already apprehensive over the privacy implications of living in a digital world, that its personal data is safe and will be used responsibly.

Major data breaches like the one at Epsilon don’t help the cause, even if they aren’t likely to cause major damage. The data stolen from Epsilon includes mostly customer names and email addresses, most of which you could probably get on Facebook anyway, and I think the concern over spear phishing is probably overblown. Maybe it’s just me, but I almost never click on links in emails from my bank or a retail store anyway (I know that’s not what email marketers want to hear, but its true.)

Still, big data analytics vendors and those working in the field should be prepared to explain how they approach security and what they are doing to keep data safe and sound.

[Cross-posted at Wikibon Blog]