LEVERAGING BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE in SECURITY STRATEGY Oday, Nothing Is More Critical to Security and HARNESS BIG DATA Loss Prevention Operations Than Meaningful Data
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LEVERAGING BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE IN SECURITY STRATEGY oday, nothing is more critical to security and HARNESS BIG DATA loss prevention operations than meaningful data. Every department within the operation Today, the sources and volume of data collected have bears the responsibility to not only provide exploded. Security operations collect every event and T incident from every transaction from various sources useful data, but to continually improve the value of that data. Business Intelligence (BI) is used to help including telephone/radio calls, alarms, environmen- companies gain insight into their operations; segment tal sensors, intrusion-detection systems, and video and target information to improve customer security, surveillance. safety, and experience while finding anomalies in the The modern security department uses a set of pro- heaps of data to run more efficiently and effectively. cesses and supporting technologies for data manage- This white paper explores how to change the game ment to allow security practitioners greater flexibility for companies. Learn how to collect and leverage in cobbling together disparate systems into a unified data to achieve effective loss prevention, risk mitiga- security information system that enables Security Di- tion, efficient fraud detection, incident analysis, and rectors to know exactly what’s going on, in real-time monitoring. while providing analysis to generate actionable items that can give security operations the agility it needs CAPITALIZING ON BIG DATA: Strategies outperforming companies are taking to deliver results Leaders are And are % % 75 166 2.2x of Leaders cite more likely to more likely to growth as the make most have formal key source of decisions career path value from based on data for analytics analytics 80% 60% 85% Leaders measure Leaders have Leaders have the impact predictive some form of of analytics analytics shared analytics investments capabilities resources Leveraging Business Intelligence in Security Strategy in times of crises. ACT We define “big data” as a capability that allows com- Proactive Risk panies to extract value from large volumes of data. Reduction Like any capability, it requires investments in tech- nologies, processes, and governance. There is no doubt that business intelligence software provides the ability to analyze a multitude of transac- tions and information on one centralized platform, empowering users to capture, analyze, and glean Understand actionable insight from the layers of data within the SEE EVERYTHING Context enterprise. Data-driven risk management requires situational awareness that can only come from a sys- SEE EVERYTHING temic and holistic approach. True value comes from correlating large amounts of incident and security data and presenting it in a visually appealing format, IT OPERATIONS SECURITY & LOSS PREVENTION whereby users are able to quickly draw conclusions • User Management • Outcomes & Involvements and act on them in a timely manner. • App Life cycle Management • Savings & Losses • Information Management • Compliance & Audits • Operations Management • Exception Alerting Nowhere is this more true than in the security func- • Network Management • Manpower Efficiency tion, where protection can only be as complete as situ- ational awareness. By giving safety, security, risk man- agement, and loss prevention managers the ability to reality of its application in the business unit and in track, organize, and analyze their data via configurable small to medium-sized businesses. For the purposes dashboard visualizations, BI software can provide con- of this paper, we will consider the iTrak® Business text and comparison of security-related information. Intelligence package available from iView Systems. This context moves the risk capabilities of an organi- While there are many competitors in the BI field— zation toward prevention from a traditional reactive many of which are already in use in organizations reporting and documentation function, providing the that have not adopted BI for security—iView software ability to show causality and structure, while giving is built specifically for the needs of security, surveil- insight into security and safety-related issues. lance, and loss prevention. Unlike SAP, Microsoft BI, IBM Cognos, and other enterprise-level BI solutions, More than 86 percent of respondents to a June 2016 iTrak® is not a software that needs to be bent to the survey by CIO Insight now say that BI is important to task of security and loss prevention through extensive their company and intrinsic to their role. Global rev- customization and programming, but one that can be enue in the business intelligence and analytics market immediately deployed to produce results. will grow more than 5 percent in 2016, reaching $16.9 billion this year according to a recent Gartner forecast. But it is only now that BI and analytics have BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE WITH ROOTS IN SECURITY AND LOSS PREVENTION matured enough that the market is offering easy- to-use, agile products designed for specific business BI is not shaping just the practice of security and functions. Off-the-shelf software products provide a loss prevention, but also their overall role in the way for data to be incorporated into larger enterprise enterprise. “In the security and related risk fields, BI. They are grounded in specific functions in a way data comes in an unending stream from every device that fills the gap between the promise of BI and the and direction,” says Martin Drew, president of iView Systems. Harnessing that data provides operational insights that create greater organizational efficiencies. The investment in security is no longer just about protecting assets—but about leveraging those ca- pabilities to create a financial return that is directly attributable to that investment. Security practitioners have long competed at a disad- vantage with other departments that made demon- strable connections to the financial bottom line. As the IT function became more integrated with security operations, the requirement to “make a business case” became the challenge for every upgrade or new investment. But as Avi Perez, the chief technical offi- 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual cer for Pyramid Analytics writes, the best practices of and is processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than business intelligence are not about making business text. Companies can buy back time using compelling vi- cases, but about solving problems. suals and eliminate the noise of spreadsheet reporting. The iTrak® BI application was built explicitly for the security function and is rooted in just that—detect- ing anomalies in the data to solve problems. The first “Casinos would spend as much as five days of every and most obvious return on investment BI makes is month just doing required manual reports,” says in the reduction of manual security processes. Fully Giselle Chen, senior business intelligence analyst at 76 percent of midsize or larger companies (more iView Systems. Automating that process can virtual- than 500 employees) relied on manual processes ly eliminate that time requirement and improve the for exception alert reporting from physical security accuracy of reports, while speeding the dissemina- systems as recently as two years ago according to tion of the information to all identified stakeholders ASIS International research. Fewer than 30 percent by simply scheduling the reports to run at whatever of these same organizations had invested in business required interval. intelligence at that time. Considering that fully 71 “Several dashboards can eliminate virtually hun- percent of companies were using BI in some aspect dreds of reports and provide the ability to quickly of their operations as early as 2012, this represented a drill down from the highest summary to as many comparatively slow adoption rate by security practi- established groups and sub-groups as required—even tioners. When iView Systems committed to change down to individual incidents,” says Chen. The inves- these statistics with its iTrak® BI it found one of the tigation is not conducted through reams of paper, but most ready sectors to be the gaming industry. by highly intuitive paths navigated by the simple click Leveraging Business Intelligence in Security Strategy of a mouse. An international and analyzed by specific organization such as a hotel Several dashboards can eliminate regions, types of proper- would be able to identify gaps ties, or seasons of the year. in efficiency as the aggregate virtually hundreds of reports This is the nature of how effect impacts the overall BI and analytics provide organization. Users can also established reports and expect a substantial decline dashboards to raise situ- in errors. While errors will always occur, through BI ational awareness while providing ad hoc reporting they can be addressed at a systemwide process level to investigate the source of problems. Throughout and fixed once. With manual reporting, a certain the process, data visualizations depict the rows and persistent level of error exists mostly at the incident columns of raw data in an intuitive format. Incident report level. Training and active monitoring can help reports presented as bar charts immediately draw the to reduce these, but human error is simply the cost of eye to anomalies. Pie charts, heat maps, and bubble doing business with manual processes. graphs all create pictures that more directly engage the problem-solving capacity of the human