Big Data to Transform Internet Security in a Big Way

By CIOReview | Friday, February 14, 2014

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FREMONT, CA: Big Data is transforming the business landscape at the global level. Companies are talking more about analytics and figuring out ways to convert it into actionable insights. Insights provide the in depth information about the internal and external environment around the company required to stay ahead in the race against competitors. There is much more to the benefits of Big Data and that is the ‘oh-so’ sensitive cyber security.

Big data has every capability to play significant role in security. As the companies widen their data network, the boundary walls might have gone for good since it allows partners, customers, and suppliers to gain corporate information in dynamic ways not possible before. However, there’s a flipside to this expansion since there is a chance of data being tapped while it travels through the data storage platform such as cloud.

Some of the functions that can be made possible by introducing Big Data into security paradigm are: checking for anomalies in the server traffic, round the clock tracking for suspicious activity in sensitive applications and data, classifying the severity of the information of the business, and keeping track of the users logged in and the users that are in touch with.

An agile solution operating at real time assessing the risks dynamically analyzing vast volumes of data is critical in today’s precarious security world. So how does Big Data fill the shoes of “Superman”? Through Big Data, businesses can gain granular information in knowing the every bit of their own business and the rest of the world, Information such as taking note of employee behavior – login, logout, number of attempts tried for authentication – and developing a model for every employee within the company is added advantage. This unique model of every employee can be used as the benchmark for comparing with the future activities of the employee. So it’s about learning what’s normal for a user in a working environment. Having a 3600 view of the organization and keeping a constant vigil needs support of Big Data environment which holds huge amount of data.

Big Data enhances identity verification:

In today’s world, a user accessing the company data might be located within the premises or outside the company. In this case, Big Data allows one to record not just the name of the person and timings of login, but other details such as: his Geo IP location, GPS location, network location, access times and access locations.

Use of Big Data can be profound in security investigations that involve network and application monitoring, web transactions, infrastructure integrity for policies and configurations, data classification, authentication data, Active Directory and server logs.

Big Data can equip security analysts with intuitive tools that have the capability to track the relationship among data sets and create correlations through which risk-aware user authentication systems can be designed.

All in all, a smart and secure world can be built by leveraging Big Data in the security.