Blog Post: 2010: A Big Data Odyssey
In the events that are generated when you track content in the context of identity and access, there lies a huge amount of data that describes patterns of access, activity, and change – data that becomes an input to an important use that progressive auditors can exploit to mitigate risk in the future: Analytics.
An analytics system can use the data about past access patterns and file activities to hypothesize about future patterns. Such inferences can help identify sensitive files that might need to be tracked. The data can also be correlated in unexpected ways to produce innovative results – you can find new value in your old data.
A solution that integrates big data analytics with file server technology heightens the strategic importance of IT: All of a sudden, IT is poised to provide services like legal discovery, classification, and data governance. Such services can increase competitive advantage and revenue while improving security.
“Big data has quickly emerged as a significant challenge for IT leaders,” Michael Cooney, citing Gartner research, writes in Network World. The architecture prescribed in this white paper can turn an IT challenge into an IT opportunity. In particular, the NoSQL server that’s included in the storage architecture can be used to analyze unstructured data by using a distributed data processing technique Google invented, called MapReduce. The business value of big data is there to be exploited in myriad ways, such as exploiting the data to find new value that increases revenue or cuts costs.
To adopt a NoSQL database or another unstructured method to analyze unstructured data, however, you’ll need to meet some additional requirements:
The result of meeting these requirements is an analytics system that can consume big data to produce business intelligence. To take it all a step further, the system should attempt to combine enterprise search with big analytics to produce business intelligence that can map diverse data and to big content.
Well, analyzing it all with AI/ML, of course.
Notes from 2010.
Auditing Unstructured Data: Identity-Aware Storage, File Activity Monitoring, and Compliance Reporting Across Platforms. This white paper argues that a multiprotocol file server with an integrated cross-platform access control system is the architectural basis for solving many problems in auditing unstructured data. | PDF
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