Nicole Bucala, vice president and general manager, Comcast Technology Solutions foresees a big increase in the value of big data analytics within the firm. The use of insights from structured and unstructured data will not only be of interest to analysts, the value to the information will be realised by many departments.
Big data insights is not just for data scientists anymore.
Bucala‘s prediction for an expanding tole for big data analytics embraces: “The ability to extract meaningful business insights from big data has largely been the domain of the highly specialized data scientist. But, as in cybersecurity, these experts are rather few and far between, and more and more teams are placing demands on this finite resource.”
What does this mean for 2024? According to Bucala: “In the coming year, we’ll see this change exponentially; data fabric platforms, and data science and machine language (DSML) platforms, are changing the game, unifying and simplifying access to enterprise data.”
Machine language is a low-level programming language made out of binary numbers or bits that can only be read by machines.
Improvements in technology will make these platforms easier to use: “The more user-friendly interfaces of these platforms give more people on more teams the ability to see and act on threats or other challenges to the business. The democratization of data comes none too soon, as advancements in AI are making it easier for bad actors to infiltrate – with more eyes watching and able to take protective action, enterprises have a real shot at staying ahead of threats.”
Cybersecurity teams will make the jump into data lakes in order to wrangle all that siloed data
The battle to protect the firm from hackers will intensify, hopefully in favour of business. Here Bucala thinks: “It’s been the lament of cybersecurity teams for years: All those security tools are producing a ton of great data, but it’s really difficult to combine that data quickly and easily to find and take action on threats. (Security information and event management (SIEM) solutions help, but they’re expensive and limited by storage and ease of access.) In 2024, data lakes will beckon, and security leaders will look from beyond their pond to see if they can obtain a little of that beach-front property being used by their colleagues on the IT, data, finance, HR or other teams.”
A data lake is a centralized repository designed to store, process, and secure large amounts of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. It can store data in its native format and process any variety of it, ignoring size limits.
Expanding upon this, Bucala says: “Data lakes for security – or security data lakes – will go mainstream, providing a much better option for bringing together and storing all that siloed security data. The result will be vastly improved cybersecurity through faster threat detection and mitigation, and better adherence to compliance mandates.”
2024 will be the year that GRC is profoundly transformed by continuous controls monitoring
Governance is key to any ethical business. In terms of the technological changes upon the corporate processes, Bucala sees: “Governance, risk and compliance (GRC) teams are going to finally catch a break with the broader adoption and use of nascent continuous controls monitoring (CCM) technologies. At the mercy of mostly manual processes and tools like Excel and PowerPoint to keep track of compliance gaps and issues, GRC teams—especially in large organizations—have been challenged to keep up-to-date with their organization’s security, risk and compliance posture. GRC professionals will be the key drivers behind the rapid adoption and use of CCM, and they’ll be able to track and manage adherence to compliance in near real-time. As a result, we’ll hear about dramatic reductions in compliance fines and penalties being levied against large organizations, and we’ll start to see cyber insurance carriers mandate the use of CMM in order to obtain or renew insurance.”
