Billions of products from city buses to dog collars, thermostats to clothes are connecting to the wireless web to make our lives easier and to enable major stride in medicine, to transmit a person’s health data back to a system where it can be reviewed, analyzed and much more. 

Big data meets security

Security today is largely established on researchers or vendors. IT modified the company's firewall settings after an intrusion, and anti-malware vendors updated their threat definitions after a threat had been identified. Using Big Data and data mining methods to predict attacks before they happen, OpenDNS Security Labs built the OpenDNS Security Graph.

The tool allows blocking of sites before they actually become destructive. Data Mining and algorithmic classification techniques such as machine learning, graph theory, anomaly detection, and temporal patterns are used in combination with contextual search, visualization, and scoring in order to predict the origins of internet attacks.

Big-picture security

Access to corporate systems is usually determined by defined roles, such as administrator, business user or guest.  But future systems will take into account not only a person's role but "the device they're using, the current threat level, the security of the location from which access is requested and so on," says Menon.