Recognizing North Korea and Kim Jong-un’s recent actions as probable bluster has parallels to assessing a rogue computer process or questionable user activity on a network. When a process goes wrong in a system, log monitoring software gives off a real-time alert as a warning. With a less-than-enterprise class solution, this alert might be all that happens, which forces systems administrators to decide on an action based on isolated, incomplete information. With lives at stake rather than system and network resources, the result could be tragic.
Context is Key for Real Understanding
The U.S. government has the benefit of a sophisticated infrastructure providing correlated analysis of any situation from multiple angles. The direct threats from North Korea are correlated with data on their lack of actual troop movements, no missile facilities preparations, and in context of historical data of frequent threats right around national holidays. Similar to the U.S. government, a true enterprise-class log management and data analytics system should enable IT managers to have a fully informed view of any specific event with all the pertinent information available at once to enable fully intelligent action. [Read more...]
With all the talk about how big data should be used, what for, and why, rarely do we hear about who uses “it.” All the recent buzz around big data is not because data has all of a sudden become more valuable, it’s that people are now realizing and discussing how to use new technologies and architectures to derive value from these large data sets.
Three friends and I went hiking last week in a dense forest. The objective was clear: to reach a small fortress about six miles from base camp. Without maps, or smartphones and no real clue how to get there, we were on our own. With no rules, or parameters to validate our moves and literally no support or back-up, we had to make instant decisions based on events as they occurred. We were trailblazers, quite literally, and had to innovate in creating a trail for others to follow just to reach our goal.
At the RSA Conference in San Francisco, it’s all security, all of the time. When one topic is the only focus over such a short period, it becomes easy to see current trends. Here are three that have caught my attention:
