Big Data Analytics: Is It The Future Of IT Security?

If you’re not using analytics tools to support your IT Security Risk Management efforts what are you using in their place?

Big data analytics tools will be crucial to enterprise security as criminals deploy faster and more sophisticated methods to steal valuable data, according to security firm RSA.

“We are really at the beginning of intelligence-driven security: it is just the tip of the iceberg. Looking forward we are going to have to be smarter [to deal with threats], and we are going to be looking at better data science,” said RSA’shead of knowledge delivery and business development,Daniel Cohen.

“It’s not ‘if’ we are going to be breached, but ‘when’ we are going to be breached, so there is a need to focus more on detection.We saw with the Target breach it was the human factor that slipped there, so we have to be able to bring in more automation.”

The number of successful attacks against high-profile businesses have clearly increased in recent years, with the compromise of Target’s point of sale systems just one example of the variety of methods that cyber criminals are using to steal data on a large scale.

Businesses are threat from a number of sources – from criminal gangs, to hacktivist and insider threats, as evidenced recently by the theft of payroll data for thousands of employees at Morrisons in the UK last week, and more famously, Edward Snowden at the NSA.

Businesses slow to adopt data analytics

However, the adoption of big data analytics within businesses for security -and the maturity of offerings from vendors- remains at an early stage.

While banks are already deploying analytics for fraud prevention purposes, and have begun engaging with big data start-ups for security services,there are few wider businesses that have adopted new techniques and tools to monitor threats.

A recent Gartner study highlighted that adoption of big data analytics currently stands at only eight percent of large enterprises, though this is set to grow to 25 percent by 2016 as businesses get to grips with the information being generated across their business.

Read the full story on computerworlduk.com

Previous ArticleImproving Security via Proper Network Segmentation Next ArticleSolving Cloud Security Will Open Adoption Floodgates