New Research Examines Big Data Analytics

By DE Editors

A new report from Gigaom Research suggests that exploiting the metadata surrounding an organization's most sensitive information assets can provide businesses with a more complete understanding of their intellectual property. Analysis of unstructured human-generated data, including e-mails, spreadsheets, presentations and other documents, can enable organizations to improve collaboration among employees, while better enabling security professionals to identify and mitigate both casual and deliberate breaches of policy, the report claims.

The report, "Applying Big Data Analytics to Human-Generated Data," evaluates the opportunities and challenges associated with analyzing human-generated data, and examines early adoption in the risk management and governance use cases. The report, which was underwritten by Varonis, also details the potential impact of these analytics for other use cases and industries.

"Most organizations fail to adequately manage the creation, use and dissemination of these key assets," the authors write. "As a result, they either introduce friction into collaboration through excessively strict access controls or risk serious data loss by sharing data too permissively."

The report says that much of the current interest in big data is directed towards the analysis of structured data or extracting insight from unstructured or loosely structured system logs and social network interactions. Similar techniques can be applied to extracting additional value from human-generated data.

For more information, visit Gigaom.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.