In the grand surrounds of Cork City Hall, the it@cork European Tech Cluster held its European Technology Summit, where Big Data as a source of intelligence for all aspects of business and security was identified as a key trend that will underpin all enterprise in the near future. This, combined with a growing maturity and utilisation of social media, both internally and externally, will allow a greater understanding of the fast changing commercial landscape.
The event was opened and praised by Minister of State for the Department of Enterprise Sean Sherlock TD, who reaffirmed the Government’s commitment to the technology sector through its Horizon 2020 initiative and investment programmes.
James Brown, business development lead, Amazon UK and Ireland, described how the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform was making hyper-scale computing and massively parallel processing available to all types of organisations. He gave the example of a molecular analysis job that would have required dedicated infrastructure costing some $20 million and taking time estimated in years that the AWS platform was able to accomplish in three hours at a cost of less than $5,000 per hour.
Brown said that such developments were removing barriers to innovation for business. "Cost of failure is one of the biggest barriers to innovation-we can reduce that risk to almost zero."
He also highlighted the resilience of the new infrastructure through the practices of one of AWS’s customers, Netflix. Brown said that Netflix uses a tool called Chaos Monkey to randomly disable servers, switches and other virtual infrastructure to ensure that resilience measures and fail-over orchestration is working correctly. This aggressive practice, said Brown, allows the company to ensure that it maintains the highest standards of service to its users.
Rik Ferguson, global vice president of research, Trend Micro, characterised the change in enterprise security strategies by saying that what was now needed was not bigger castles but better dungeons.
By this Ferguson meant that the old focus on the perimeter is now insufficient and organisations need to ensure that if an attacker does penetrate defences that not only is it difficult to move around within the organisation, but that the information they seek is better protected, difficult to access and most importantly, difficult to exfiltrate.
Ferguson said that a Big Data approach to security, combining everything from personnel records to video monitoring and behavioural analysis would allow companies to make the correlations between what might at first seem innocuous, unrelated events, but that in a wider context may reveal an orchestrated attack.
"What can appear benign in isolation, in context, can be the pattern of an attack."
Looking farther forward, Brian O’Farrell, sales manager, SMB division, Google, cited Gartner research indicating that in 2013 mobile phones will become the most common way to access the Internet. But despite the near ubiquity of smart phones and other supporting technologies, O’Farrell predicted that "a big shift in tech will be making full use of the technologies available to us".
He elaborated by pointing out that there are very few companies have yet devised a strategy to leverage multi-screening-the now common phenomenon where people use a smart phone or tablet while watching television, interacting with others in the experience through social media.
Delving further into the realms of Big Data, Nigel Williams, vice president, field marketing and business development, OpenText, made the bold assertion that "structured information is done-unstructured is the future".
"Every business is an information business," argued Williams. "People are very focused on the information. There are two worlds of information, and they are not created equal-the structured and the unstructured. The latter is where the value is."
When asked if the tools to derive value from this unstructured data were up to the task, Williams was positive and optimistic.
"Yes, the tools are there, but the platform isn’t. The industry needs to work harder to ensure the platforms to accommodate the data and the tools are made available," said Williams.
However, in light of Ferguson’s assertions about making it more difficult for attackers inside an organisation, Brendan Moran, data scientist, EMC, said that currently, there is little provision for security in big data architecture.
"Security is absolutely zero in the big data space," said Moran.
Andrew O’Shaughnessy, CEO, Newsweaver, presented on social media in enterprise and highlighted the ability of social media to engage employees. He cited research by Towers Watson that said companies that are highly effective at employee engagement are 2.5 times more likely to outperform peers who are ineffective in this area.
O’Shaughnessy said that a culture of social communication and exchange needs to be led from the top and said that the most successful CEOs are the ones that are most social. He supported this with statistics which said that in 2012, among the world’s top 50 performing companies, 66% of the CEOs had social media accounts.
Social media in enterprise can bring back that feeling for a company, irrespective of size, of everyone being in room talking, said O’Shaughnessy.
"We are overwhelmed with the support and attendance at this year’s Technology Gathering event," said Denis Collins, chairman, it@cork. "We endeavour to create a platform between industry, government, public sector, and academia through cooperative collaboration and innovation. We strive to be innovative when hosting such technology-centric events and to be leaders in showcasing upcoming industry trends and knowledge".
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