Big Data and Information Security Part I

Big Data and Information Security Analytics Part I

As cyber-attacks become increasingly advanced and persistent, and the traditional notion of a security perimeter has all but ceased to exist, organizations are having to rethink their cybersecurity strategies. New real-time security intelligence solutions are combining big data and advanced analytics to correlate security events across multiple data sources, providing early detection of suspicious activities, rich forensic analysis tools and highly automated remediation workflows.

Ever since big data technologies have become more accessible, and not just for the largest enterprises, the technology has become one of the cornerstones of the digital transformation.

As more and more corporate assets become digitalized, companies from all industries are now increasingly reliant on big data analytics to store and analyze huge amounts of data, mining it for business intelligence, optimizing their business processes, improving relationships with customers and so on. With this in mind, it is hardly surprising that big data has been recognized as the single most important IT trend.

However, with great power comes great responsibility. Digital transformation not only enables a whole range of new business benefits, but it also exposes the company’s digital assets to new security risks.

Combined with the increasingly tight compliance regulations imposed on many industries, this makes all aspects of information security extremely important, which is why IT security comes in as the second most important IT trend.

Looking at the most important IT trends, our Big Data Security Analytics survey recently found that the combination of two key technologies – big data and information security analytics – has already been recognized as an important development by over half of the respondents.

Although the market for security analytics solutions is still very young, it is growing rapidly, and public awareness of its potential seems to be quite impressive, especially when projecting companies’ expectations into the future. Almost 90% of our survey participants feel certain that the technology will be playing a critical role in their corporate security infrastructures within a few years.

A look at the breakdown of the importance of big data security analytics across different industries reveals several interesting points. For example, above all industries, telcos view big data security analytics as most important to their business. This is actually not that surprising since telecommunications companies have to deal with huge and constantly growing amounts of digital assets, many of them classified as sensitive and tightly regulated, such as customers’ personally identifiable information, billing and other financial data.