Improving Security Through Data Analysis and Visualizations

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We’ve all heard the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. When done properly, visualizing data enables people to see relationships and patterns in their data that they might never see, or alternately would take them a very long time to uncover. Visualizing data also enables humans to process exponentially more data than would ever be possible simply by just looking at the raw numbers.

Ultimately, using effective data visualizations will enable a security analytics program to derive much more value from the data. There’s a term I really love that I believe was coined by Bill Franks, the Chief Analytics Officer of Teradata, which is time to insight (TTI). TTI is a measure of how long it takes to go from raw data to something of value. It is important, especially in security, because in the security realm, insights’ value decreases over time. Effective visualization can dramatically decrease the TTI and thus improve your organization’s response time and increase the value of insights and analytic efforts.

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