What is “big data?”
Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data—so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few. This data is big data, and it is more than simply a matter of size; it is an opportunity to find insights into new and emerging types of data and content, to make your business more agile and to answer questions that were previously considered beyond your reach.1
According to IDC, it is imperative that organizations and IT leaders focus on the ever-increasing volume, variety and velocity of information that forms big data.2
Volume. Many factors contribute to the increase in data volume—transaction-based data stored through the years, text data constantly streaming in from social media, increasing amounts of sensor data being collected, etc. In the past, excessive data volume created a storage issue. But with today’s decreasing storage costs, other issues emerge, including how to determine relevance amidst the large volumes of data and how to create value from relevant data.
Variety. Data today comes in many types, from traditional databases to hierarchical data stores created by end users and OLAP systems, to text documents, email, meter-collected data, video, audio, stock ticker data and financial transactions. By some estimates, 80 percent of an organization’s data is not numeric! But it still must be included in analyses and decision making.
Velocity. According to Gartner, velocity means “both how fast data is being produced and how fast the data must be processed to meet demand.” Reacting quickly enough to deal with velocity is a challenge for most organizations.3
Incident Management at its core is about capturing, managing and analyzing data to make informed decisions—this same data has grown exponentially in the past few years. The Incident, Investigation and Case Management space is becoming the central repository for such impactful data as it relates to planning counter-measures and making informed decisions. The who, what, when, where and how information of events, incidents, investigations and cases can have profound impact on business decisions that are made outside corporate security.
Never before have we seen the level of enterprise data capture and use of analytics and trending tools being used in security for massive datasets. Perspective has become the end point from all the data that flows in and out of a Security Operations Center (SOC). Video feeds, alerts/notifications, triggers, sensors and alarm data all can have an impact on immediate and future decision making alike.
Perspective is designed to accommodate the variety, volume and the velocity of data being fed into security operations and investigations. The result is a solution that collects, analyzes and reports on security and enterprise data to allow users to make informed decisions.
Key capabilities include:
- Trending, analysis and ad-hoc querying.
- Visual Link Analysis for basic mapping of structured Perspective data.
- Integration to IBM i2 Analytical stack.
- Full text search capabilities throughout the system.
- Dynamic dashboarding.
- Enterprise Investigation and Case Management.
For more information on big data, request our latest white paper, Strengthening Intelligence and Investigations with Incident Management Software. This paper emphasizes intelligence and investigations, and discusses how the right incident management and analytical software can empower security professionals in their efforts to discover and understand information and connections (gain intelligence) and act on (investigate) security incidents that affect their organizations.
—Frank Kennedy, Director of Global Sales
1 Source: IBM. “Bringing Big Data to the Enterprise,” 2013.
2 Source: IDC. “Big Data Analytics: Future Architectures, Skills and Roadmaps for the CIO,” September 2011.
3 Source: SAS. “Big Data – What Is It?,” 2013.