A Comparative Analysis of Security Features and Concerns in NoSQL Databases

Current developments in cloud computing and also distributed internet applications have produced the demand to store huge quantities of data in dispersed databases that offer high availability and scalability. Over the last few years, increasingly more firms are adopting various sorts of non-relational data sources, frequently described as NoSQL data sources. By definition, NoSQL systems are not relational and also do not provide full SQL capabilities. Moreover, unlike relational databases, it uses consistency and security in exchange for performance and scalability. Security issues end up being more important as a growing number of sensitive data is kept in NoSQL databases. This article, therefore, examines the security features in four of the most preferred NoSQL databases; Cassandra, MongoDB, Redis and Neo4j, one from each category of databases. Unlike in most survey literature on NoSQL security features, that comparisons made excluded the graph database Neo4j, it is inclusive in this work, which makes this survey unique from others. Also, this will give awareness to developers and database administrators and also help them in choosing the best platform for deploying NoSQL databases.