Big Data to the Rescue? Cyber Attacks Rank as Major Global Threat in 2016

While companies are increasingly taking advantage of Big Data technology to improve operations, increase sales, and lower costs, many are discovering that mining usable information from large amounts of data can also be used to enhance security by offering a broader view of risks and vulnerabilities.

The growing threat of cyber attacks was a major topic of concern at the recent 2016 World Economic Forum (WEF). According to the WEF’s 11^th annual Global Risks Report, cyber-attacks rank in the top ten threats in 140 economies. In North America, cyber-attacks are cited as the greatest risk to doing business while Asia and Europe, increasingly reliant on connected technologies, are fearful as well.

To counter the cyber-crime wave, Big Data and analytics are developing increasingly effective defenses against cyber-intrusions. Better, faster, actionable security information is reducing the critical time from detection to remediation, making it possible to identify abnormal behavior earlier.

In addition, Big Data analysis today can be done in real time or near real-time, and provide a better understanding of attack methods and approaches. As a result, companies can potentially identify new types of attacks on a network during the penetration stage, before hackers succeed in committing a cyber-crime. Such technological developments are allowing enterprises to stay ahead and respond to evolving threats.

Preempting tomorrow’s potential cyber attack is based on the ability to know what is going on now and be able to compare that data to earlier periods. An effective Big Data solution needs to be able to store and analyze billions of transaction flows in order to: identify and predict performance problems; perform root cause analysis and detect infrastructure changes’ impact on IT reliability.

Big Data companies such as SQream Technologies provide high-speed analysis to help organizations detect and mitigate threats by connecting and correlating high volume of multi-sources data, deriving from different sources such as the network, insider threats and third party vendors.

Organizations can enhance their defense posture by empowering their IT security environment with big data technologies such as SQream DB. SQream boosts the performance capabilities of mature and emerging cyber security technologies by up to 100 times – with significantly increased ingestion and processing time, on terabytes to petabytes of data.

The more data that is being analyzed – the more comprehensive are the results.  Adding its minimum hardware requirements to the equation – a standard 2U server for 100 terabytes of raw data – turns SQream into the undoubtedly most price-compelling big data analytics database out there, breaking through budget barriers.

The failure to understand and address cyber-risks could have far-reaching consequences for national economies, economic sectors and global enterprises.

However, it appears that Big Data is now on the offensive in the ongoing battle to keep cyber-space safe. While the 11^th Annual Global Risk Report states cyber-security as one of the main threats to economic stability going into 2016, this fear has abated since 2012, when cyber-security was ranked as the fourth most likely global threat.

Conclusively, to combat the dynamic, evolving threat to their cybersecurity, organizations need an equally dynamic solution. Today, Big Data is creating more robust threat and risk detection tools that are enabling companies big and small to preempt malicious activity on a wider and deeper scale. It’s Big Data’s storing and rapid analysis capabilities of large volumes of historic information that is facilitating cyber-security technology’s ability to identify complex patterns, detect new threats and develop effective responses.