This document discusses facts and fictions about big data in three sections. It begins by stating that individuals create large amounts of metadata through smartphone use that is collected and analyzed by companies. However, it notes that big data is often mined poorly to create ineffective algorithms. It then states that big data is automating tasks that previously required manual labor. The document goes on to discuss that while security companies want to analyze big data, they currently lack the capabilities to properly handle its volume and velocity. It also says security developers are not easily extracting value from collected data due to insufficient analysis tools. Finally, it asserts that current analytics technology is not ready-made for security needs because data is often poorly indexed.

1. FACT OR FICTION ?

2. Fact #1: You are Big Data. Much of the world’s Big
Data is created as metadata from users’
Smartphone's and GPS traffic.

3. Every day you create metadata with Smartphone's
that enable GPS location services. Every picture you
take, every website you visit, every route you map
creates metadata that is stored and available for
analysis. With more than five billion mobile phones
in use, including more than one billion Smartphone's
in 2012, according to research firm Strategy Analytics,
it’s no wonder that many enterprises and
government organizations are interested in gleaning
valuable content from the information.

4. Fact #2: Big Data tends to be mined poorly to build
ineffective threat analysis algorithms.

5. With all the metadata that exists, we are only now
figuring out how to make sense of it and how to
cultivate beneficial data from it. For one, enterprises
traditionally haven’t had the resources in place to
analyze metadata. As those investments increase,
the mining for trends and useful analysis will
increase as well.

6. Fact #3: Big Data is automating tasks that used to
involve tedious manual labour.

7. Software companies are developing better business
intelligence tools that can not only analyze
metadata, but also automate tasks to more quickly
make use of that data to their advantage. This
allows companies to be more flexible and also make
the analysis of Big Data much less costly than in the
past.

8. Fiction #1: Security companies are equipped to handle
the volume and velocity of Big Data.

9. Like many enterprises, security companies are also
learning to wrap their hands around Big Data, and
the theory of Big Data for that matter, eliminating
potential vulnerabilities to ensure that the data
remains clean for analysis and production. As the
concept of Big Data grows and evolves, security
companies must perpetually grow and evolve too.

10. Fiction #2: Security developers are easily extracting
value from collected data.

11. The old saying “you don’t know what you don’t
know” applies to security developers. Without
proper analysis tools in place, security companies
aren’t able to extract valuable content from the
collected data. Only with those analysis tools,
algorithms and applications can developers truly
garner valuable insight from collected data.

12. Fiction #3: Analytics technology is ready-made for
security.

13. From the phrase “finding a needle in the haystack,”
analytics is useless in haystacks of data where there
are no needles to begin with. The hype has caused us
to create massive data stacks with poor references
(or indices) around those stacks. Any data analyst
will attest to the fact that a better index of smaller
data sets yields better analytics than a larger data
set with lame indices.