Last week, we were lucky enough to take part in the Cyber Innovation Zone at Infosec 2015. Our Product Manager, Ed Wood sums up his experience at Europe’s largest information security event.
As a recent recruit to the Cambridge Intelligence team, representing the company at Infosec 2015 was a fairly daunting prospect.
It was a late addition to our events calendar, awarded following a successful “pitch-off” event organized by the Cyber Growth Partnership (a collaboration of TechUK and DCMS).
Our unexpected attendance provided a very welcome opportunity to assess the need for network visualization across the cyber and information security markets.
Network visualization & the Cyber Security use case
Cambridge Intelligence is young but growing company, focused on extracting value and insight from complex data networks. Part of the attraction of the business to me was the broad market appeal and rich numbers of use-cases our technology – KeyLines – can serve.
The data could represent people or machines (nodes), and the phone calls they make or the packets of data passing between them (links).
We had already worked with some exciting companies in the cyber security space, so obviously there was some interest.
But as we set up our modest stand early on the Tuesday morning I really did not know what the next few days would hold. Although, there was always the prospect of a keynote by the controversial Mr McAfee to look forward to, in case stand traffic was slow.
I need not have worried.
Day 1 was a blur of visitors – a few had already made a point of visiting us but many were passers-by who were drawn in by our tagline: “Understand your Connected Data”, or the slick visualizations flashing by on the big screen.
It was clear that the cyber security market is desperate for new and improved ways to visualize their connected data.
The mixed crowd further confirmed our hypothesis.
I met commercial managers, wanting the ‘cool’ factor that visualization brings. I met analytical experts seeking a better way to deep-dive into their connected data. I met developers and CTOs, struggling to create their own visualizations in-house.
All of them understood the value that network visualization could bring.
Product Managers are easily pleased creatures and it was great to get strong and direct feedback on the product from so many people in such a short space of time.
Happily much of this feedback was extremely positive about the capabilities and performance of the product. It was especially gratifying to be able to speak to customers who were struggling to add compelling visualization (using open source tools) and could immediately see that their time and effort could be substantially reduced by adopting KeyLines.
The whole experience – while exhausting – was very satisfying. Even the two presentation were well attended – the appeal of a seat to an exhausted delegate was of course an unrelated factor….
Visualization: Your life raft when drowning in data
But we did get a clear signal that the cyber security market has a strong need for visualization: the richness and complexity and volume of the data that is collected mean that without good visualization, customers and partners risk ‘drowning in data’.
Good visualization empowers good decision-making: whether that’s looking for suspicious human behavior, or patterns of connections between servers or the distribution of files.
If some of the problems I’ve described sound familiar and your application and customers would benefit from powerful but easy-to-integrate visualization we would love to hear from you.
Thank you, again, to UKTI and DCMS for the opportunity to take part, and to the team at Reed Exhibitions / InfoSecurity 2015 for organizing such as great show.
The post Data Visualization and Cyber Security appeared first on .