RSA's Art Coviello Points to Big Data as Transformative Solution to Security Challenges

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 26, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- RSA CONFERENCE 2013 --

News Summary:

• The convergence of Big Data with mobility, cloud, and a social media-driven society have created unparalleled opportunities alongside an equally evolving threat landscape.
• Big Data analytics and velocity lead to intelligence-driven security models that can learn and evolve from continuously changing threats.
• The security industry must adopt an adaptive capacity to meet the challenges of advanced threats.

Full Story:

In his opening keynote at RSA Conference 2013, Art Coviello, Executive Vice President of EMC Corporation and Executive Chairman of RSA, The Security Division of EMC^® (NYSE: EMC) addressed a record crowd about the ways that Big Data is transforming the security industry, information technology, business and society.  Specifically Coviello articulated how an intelligence-driven security strategy that uses powerful Big Data analytics will help security practitioners regain the advantages of vigilance and time to better detect and defend against advanced threats.

Coviello noted the sheer amount of unstructured data being mined and the richness and variability of that data provides great opportunities for business and society, while that same data also provides new attack vectors for adversaries.

"But, new tools and techniques are coming online to analyze all of this data. It won't be long before Big Data applications and stores become the 'crown jewels' of an organization. . .  And those crown jewels will be readily accessible in the cloud and via mobile devices across our hyper-connected enterprises – and not just by us, but by our adversaries as well."

Coviello also called for a more realistic level of understanding when it comes to the escalation of threats. "Having the right level of understanding is key, because if we, as an industry, overhype this situation, organizations won't take the necessary measures to prepare themselves."

Coviello put forward that organizations can no longer afford to remain idle when it comes to updating their security measures and must be willing to take action to adopt an intelligence-driven security model to better defend against unknown threats.  The security industry, he said, must also develop an adaptive capacity built on security analytics, risk-based controls and multiple sources of threat intelligence to help security organizations more rapidly identify and respond to threats.  Coviello articulated his vision for an intelligence-driven security model enabled by Big Data that can be applied in two ways:

• Security Management for Big Data – Despite today's compute power, bandwidth, database management and storage capacity, organizations will still require all data sets to be analyzed so that they can gain better visibility into a wide variety of contextual data, structured and unstructured, internal and external. Organizations will need to have the right level of context to build specific information about digital assets, users and systems.  Big Data architectures can and should be scalable enough to meet each organization's unique requirements. Organizations will then be able to spot and correlate abnormal behavior in people, transactions and the flow and use of data to identify potential attacks and fraud. 
• Development and application of controls for Big Data – Organizations will need to subscribe to a more holistic approach for implementing individual Big Data controls by replacing isolated controls that are task-specific, such as malware blocking.  Individual controls should evolve to interact with intelligence feeds, risk and compliance platforms, security management systems, and each other making them more dynamic and situationally aware.  Other task-specific Big Data controls should have the capacity to be self-learning.

Coviello also cited examples of technologies starting to meet these new Big Data requirements by building tools with Big Data analytics such as the new RSA^® Authentication Manager 8.0 platform. He outlined how Authentication Manager 8.0 combines risk-based analytics drawn from a self-learning engine refined through more than 30 billion transactions with a powerful rules engine and industry-leading RSA SecurID^® two-factor authentication.  RSA also recently announced the RSA^® Security Analytics platform that is designed to provide a Big Data approach to security monitoring by fusing security log and packet data with internal and external threat intelligence.  

Referring to RSA's recent Big Data Security Brief, Coviello highlighted the six guiding principles that can help organizations begin planning for the Big Data-driven transformation of their security toolsets and operations as part of an intelligence-driven security program. 

Additional Resources

• Download the RSA Security Brief, "Big Data Fuels Intelligence-Driven Security"
• Get Art Coviello's full RSA Conference 2013 keynote transcript on the EMC Reflections Blog
• Connect with RSA via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and the RSA Speaking of Security Blog and Podcast

About RSA

RSA, The Security Division of EMC, is the premier provider of security, risk and compliance management solutions for business acceleration. RSA helps the world's leading organizations succeed by solving their most complex and sensitive security challenges. These challenges include managing organizational risk, safeguarding mobile access and collaboration, proving compliance, and securing virtual and cloud environments.

Combining business-critical controls in identity assurance, encryption & key management, SIEM, Security Analytics, Data Loss Prevention and Fraud Protection with industry-leading GRC capabilities and robust consulting services, RSA brings visibility and trust to millions of user identities, the transactions that they perform and the data that is generated. For more information, please visit www.EMC.com/RSA.

EMC, RSA and SecurID are either registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.  All other products and/or services referenced are trademarks of their respective companies.

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SOURCE EMC Corporation