A growing number of companies are repurposing funds to use the new breed of cloud technology to store and analyze petabytes of data including web logs, click stream data, and social media content to gain better insights about their customers and business.

As a result, information classification becomes even more critical, and information ownership must be addressed to facilitate any reasonable classification.

Many of these organizations struggle with implementing these concepts, making this a significant challenge. We will need to identify owners for the outputs of big data processes, as well as the raw data.

Thus, data ownership will be distinct from information ownership—perhaps with IT owning the raw data and business unit teams taking responsibility for the outputs.

The challenge of detecting and preventing advanced persistent threats can best be answered by using big-data style analysis. These techniques play a key role in helping detect threats at an early stage, using sophisticated pattern analysis and combining and analyzing multiple data sources. There is also the potential for anomaly identification using feature extraction.

Today, event logs are often ignored unless an incident occurs. Big data provides the opportunity to consolidate and evaluate logs automatically from multiple sources rather than in isolation.

This can provide insight that individual logs cannot, and it can potentially enhance intrusion detection systems (IDS) and intrusion prevention systems (IPS) through continual adjustment and effectively learning “good” and “bad” behaviors.

Integrating information from physical security systems, such as building access controls and even CCTV, could also significantly enhance IDS and IPS to a point where insider attacks and social engineering are factored in to the detection process. This presents the possibility of significantly more advanced detection of cybercrime, fraud, and related criminal activities.

We know that organizational silos reduce the effectiveness of security systems, so businesses must be aware that the potential effectiveness of big data style analysis will be diluted unless these issues are addressed through solid data integration.

You DO NOT have to bet the farm and the horses to get where you want to go with your data and analytics assets.

Engage a successful, seasoned thought partner to get a value-laden perspective. Our Austin, Texas location keeps us at the epicenter of planning analytics and data-driven innovation, and it keeps our global capabilities and services at the forefront of our industry.

Email us at kcerny@mia-consulting.com or call at 512.478.3848 us to start a friendly, productive conversation.