Earlier this week, McAfee released a study revealing how organizations worldwide are unable to harness the power of Big Data for security purposes. According to the report ‘Needle in a Datastack’, businesses are vulnerable to security breaches due to their inability to properly analyze or store big data.
The ability to detect data breaches within minutes is critical in preventing data loss, yet only 35 percent of firms stated that they have the ability to do this. In fact, more than a fifth (22 percent) said they would need a day to identify a breach, and five percent said this process would take up to a week. On average, organizations reported that it takes 10 hours for a security breach to be recognized.
Nearly three quarters (73 percent) of respondents claimed they can assess their security status in real-time and they also responded with confidence in their ability to identify in real-time insider threat detection (74 percent), perimeter threats (78 percent), zero day malware (72 percent) and compliance controls (80 percent). However, of the 58 percent of organizations that said they had suffered a security breach in the last year, just a quarter (24 percent) had recognized it within minutes. In addition, when it came to actually finding the source of the breach, only 14 percent could do so in minutes, while 33 percent said it took a day and 16 percent said a week.
This false confidence highlights a disconnect between the IT department and security professionals within organizations, which is further highlighted when the Needle in a Datastack findings are compared with the with a recent Data Breach Investigations report of security incidents. The study of 855 incidents showed that 63 percent took weeks or months to be discovered. The data was taken from these organizations within seconds or minutes in almost half (46 percent) of the cases.
Needle in a Datastack found that on average that organizations are storing approximately 11-15 terabytes of security data a week, a figure that Gartner Group predicts will double annually through 2016. To put that in perspective, 10 terabytes is the equivalent of the printed collection of the Library of Congress. Despite storing such large volumes of data, 58 percent of firms admitted to only holding on to it for less than three months, thereby negating many of the advantages of storing it in the first place.
