by John Matelski

Another day, and yet another cyber hack! As someone who works for a county government agency, I know all too well the daily challenges that are faced maintaining a secure infrastructure, and protecting citizen and constituent data. The unfortunate reality is, as our society becomes more digitally enabled and reliant, we are creating more avenues through which criminals can access our data.

Though the cases that make the news are the big ones like the IRS data breach, or the Sony hack – our reality is the attacks against small businesses, local governments and individuals are the ones that impact us the most. Many times, businesses that are successfully targeted by a cyber-attack go out of business soon thereafter. They simply do not have the resources to respond and recover.

by Blake Wofford

The reality is that I had no idea whether or not I was being effective. When an attack came through and got detected by my IDS/IPS (or anti-virus or because someone had a pop-up on their screen that they noticed), I would block a URL, or create a blacklist, or use some other form of remediation. I always knew in the back of my mind that this was the least effective way to work. I didn't know a better way to work. I needed focus and clarity. I needed context.

by Joerg Sieber

How do you eat an elephant?”

“One bite at a time!”

Remember the old saying? It holds true. But what if the elephant grows every time you take a bite, as is the case in today’s IT and security world?

Every time a data analyst takes a bite out of big data, more data appears, resulting in complete overload of information to the point where analysis paralysis sets in. Data from network operations, data from your firewalls, data from your mobile security solution, data from endpoints… it all keeps streaming in. Security professionals today are dealing with a world where data literally clogs up the analysis pipeline, making it useless beyond belief. According to Goldman Sachs, 90 percent of the world’s data has been created in the last two years. And the influx of data is not slowing down any time soon.