FACT OR FICTION ?

Fact #1: You are Big Data. Much of the world’s Big Data is created as metadata

from users’ Smartphone's and GPS traffic.

Every day you create metadata with Smartphone's that enable GPS location services. Every picture you take, every website you visit, every route you map creates metadata that is stored and available for analysis. With more than five billion mobile phones in use, including more than one billion Smartphone's in 2012, according to research firm Strategy Analytics, it’s no wonder that many enterprises and government organizations are interested in gleaning valuable content from the information.

Fact #2: Big Data tends to be mined poorly to build ineffective threat analysis

algorithms.

With all the metadata that exists, we are only now figuring out how to make sense of it and how to cultivate beneficial data from it. For one, enterprises traditionally haven’t had the resources in place to analyze metadata. As those investments increase, the mining for trends and useful analysis will increase as well.

Fact #3: Big Data is automating tasks that used to involve tedious manual labour.

Software companies are developing better business intelligence tools that can not only analyze metadata, but also automate tasks to more quickly make use of that data to their advantage. This allows companies to be more flexible and also make the analysis of Big Data much less costly than in the past.

Fiction #1: Security companies are equipped to handle the volume and velocity

of Big Data.

Like many enterprises, security companies are also learning to wrap their hands around Big Data, and the theory of Big Data for that matter, eliminating potential vulnerabilities to ensure that the data remains clean for analysis and production. As the concept of Big Data grows and evolves, security companies must perpetually grow and evolve too.

Fiction #2: Security developers are easily extracting value from collected data.

The old saying “you don’t know what you don’t know” applies to security developers. Without proper analysis tools in place, security companies aren’t able to extract valuable content from the collected data. Only with those analysis tools, algorithms and applications can developers truly garner valuable insight from collected data.

Fiction #3: Analytics technology is ready-made for security.

From the phrase “finding a needle in the haystack,” analytics is useless in haystacks of data where there are no needles to begin with. The hype has caused us to create massive data stacks with poor references (or indices) around those stacks. Any data analyst will attest to the fact that a better index of smaller data sets yields better analytics than a larger data set with lame indices.