Big Data, is that you?
Posted by Heather Howland in Security Intelligence, Webinars
Big data is still big, but looks a heck of a lot different than it has in the past.
For the previous ten years or so, “big data” growth has been defined using the three v’s: volume, velocity, and variety. From an IT security perspective, is there one of these traits that has the most impact? Could it be that the variety of new types of big data is causing most of the headaches for enterprise IT departments? Here are examples of new sources of big data and their impact on IT security departments.
Social Media
According to Q1 Labs’ CSO, Chris Poulin, the social media boom has resulted in two major challenges when it comes to enterprise IT security. In this Forbes article, he states that the first challenge is how to best keep networks safe from hackers utilizing spear-fishing techniques (or similar) to target employees and partners. The second challenge, most applicable to the topic of big data, is how to effectively detect network anomalies, considering the massive quantities and types of data generated by social media applications.
Electronic Health Records
As Healthcare organizations are gradually moving towards electronic patient health records (EHR), it not only demands compliance with HIPAA regulations, but it also presents an immediate leap of data volume and complexity. Why is it complex? Before EHR, patient data was stored in a room, in folders, on shelves. Usually only a handful of administrators would directly access the data for physicians. Now, with EHR in the mix, that same data is available to more people and regularly exchanged between partner health organizations. The chance of sensitive data loss and exposure is exponentially higher.
Given new types of big data resulting from sources including social media applications, credit card data storage (across many locations and providers), and electronic health records, IT departments everywhere are trying to wrap their heads around the best way to monitor and protect it all from internal and external threats.
QRadar operates at a big data scale, with real-time security analytics pin-pointing risks and providing actionable security intelligence. For example, one of our customers operates at a trance inducing 6 billion events per day and is able to isolate critical security information from the noise. Another customer, who happens to be a Fortune 100 energy company, uses QRadar to monitor 6 million card swipes per day and is able to detect 25-50 high priority offenses out of 2 billion daily events.
If I was big data, I’d feel a bit humbled right now.
Read more about security intelligence and be sure to register for our upcoming webcast on Febrary 22, with Dark Reading, titled “No One is Immune to Being Hacked. Strategies for Staying Out of the Headlines”.
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