3 Key Trends Driving the Shift to Security Analytics

Never before has it been so easy to be so bad.

When it comes to criminal, terror, and cyber threats, the playing field has shifted. Today, security organizations are fighting increasingly sophisticated and complex battles, and those battles are being waged against adversaries who are much more advanced than those of the past.

You might assume that conducting and successfully resolving investigations has become simpler in recent years thanks to technological innovation. Today, government and enterprise security organizations have more data available to them and more sophisticated tools than ever before. So it would stand to reason that security teams would have an easier time finding “the needle in the haystack” rapidly and with highly accurate results.

But the reality?

Despite the many tools and mountains of data, effectively detecting and preventing threats is a lot more difficult than it would seem at first. In fact, all too often, valuable data goes untapped, security teams miss out on potentially critical clues, and investigations remain unresolved.

To address this issue, in recent years organizations have started turning to analytics tools that aim to analyze massive amounts of data and generate actionable insights. But in many cases organizations deploy proprietary solutions built in-house, and it has become increasingly evident that this approach is no longer viable or effective in enabling organizations to gain the insights needed to effectively investigate and remediate events.

In this post, we’ll touch upon the 3 key trends motivating government and enterprise security organizations to adopt open security analytics platforms. We recently explored these same trends in our in-depth report, which you can find here.

Trend 1 – Security Threats are Becoming More Difficult to Detect and Mitigate

“We are facing aggressive and sophisticated threats on many fronts. Whether it is terrorism now moving at the speed of social media, or the increasingly blended threat of cyber intrusions and state-sponsored economic espionage, or malign foreign influence and interference or active shooters and other violent criminals threatening our communities, or the scourge of opioid trafficking and abuse, or hate crimes, human trafficking, crimes against children—the list of threats we are worried about is not getting any shorter, and none of the threats on that list are getting any easier.” – Christopher Miller, director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC)

Today, criminals and terrorists have more sophisticated and powerful tools at their disposal than ever; from technologies that conceal communications and transactions, to world-class malware that’s been put in the hands of amateurs – bad actors have significantly upped their game. Advanced tools help perpetrators evade detection more easily, while the threats themselves have become more complex and damaging.

Trend 2 – Data is Growing Rapidly and is Highly Fragmented, Making it Harder to Connect the Dots

Today, the world is drowning in data, with 3 quintillion bytes of new data created per day.

According to Sue Gordon, former U.S. Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, “Data is the fuel for government services and private sector activity; national security and e-commerce; situational awareness and competitive advantage; early warning and fraud detection; to name just a few. Increasingly, data is the answer to every question, the fuel of every action, and the target of every bad actor, from criminals to terrorists to state-sponsored entities.”

But security organizations are all too often unable to tame and make use of their data, due to the massive volumes, the wide variety of sources and the siloed nature of where data is created and stored. And data that goes untapped and unmined is as good as useless when it comes to detecting and preventing threats.

Trend 3 – Security Organizations Are Increasingly Adopting Open Software

To overcome the data challenges and to address the complexity of threats, organizations need platforms that can take data at scale from any source and turn it into high-quality real-time insights. While some organizations have been using homegrown solutions, these tools have significant limitations and are unable to keep up with the rapid evolution of technology.

Security organizations are now increasingly deploying open security analytics software. The right platform will help organizations easily fuse data from all their systems and sources, enhance collaboration across teams and provide high-quality insights – while supporting the unique needs of security organizations and providing an open architecture that enables leveraging the latest AI and machine learning capabilities.

Want to learn more about the key trends driving the adoption of open security analytics platforms and how it can support your organization?

Download our new report now.