CDM: Where Cybersecurity Meets Big Data

This interview is an excerpt from our recent research guide, “Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) and Einstein: The Foundations of Federal Civilian Cyberdefense.” To download the complete guide, click here.

Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) requires constant monitoring to ensure government IT departments strengthen the security of their cyber networks. When the general public thinks of such monitoring, they generally think of enhanced personal identification systems, beefed up security perimeters, and network sensor capacity. What is often overlooked, however, are the technologies necessary to store, process, and analyze the petabytes worth of information needed for a comprehensive approach to CDM and cybersecurity at large.

One increasingly popular method to harness the volumes of information leveraged for cybersecurity is to deploy big data open source software (OSS) technologies. One of the most popular OSS technologies for big data is Apache Hadoop, a framework that allows for the distributed storage, processing, and analysis of large diverse data sets across clusters of industry standard servers.

TJ Laher, product marketing manager, and Sam Heywood, director of product management at Cloudera, an organization leading innovation in the big data OSS community, sat down with GovLoop to discuss how OSS and Cloudera can help agencies improve their cybersecurity postures.

How can agencies begin to leverage complex technology like Hadoop to improve their cybersecurity posture? That’s where Cloudera comes in. Cloudera offers additional software to its core, open source Hadoop platform that takes the hassle out of deploying, managing, and securing the Hadoop environment so that agencies can focus on applying the technology to fight cyber crime. Cloudera calls this platform an enterprise data hub (EDH).

Cloudera’s EDH allows agencies to manage massive volumes of multi-structured data at lower cost, making it the ideal platform to ingest data that can be applied to cybersecurity analytics. By leveraging Cloudera’s EDH for improved cybersecurity and continuous monitoring, government agencies can:

• Modernize cybersecurity infrastructure. Organizations can implement and maintain a future-proofed platform for data growth that keeps up with current and forward-looking cybersecurity applications and use cases.
• Achieve faster advanced threat detection. Once an organization’s information is on the platform, cybersecurity analysts can deploy behavior-driven advanced analytics and better visualize their information in order to decide which potential threats should be investigated.
• Accelerate threat investigation and mitigation. Upon determining which potential threats should be inspected and mitigated, analysts can do so faster and more thoroughly with access to full-fidelity data that spans multiple decades.

“Organizations usually struggle with determining where threats and breaches are because their data is not in one location,” Heywood said. “They also lack sophisticated data analytics tools.”

Cloudera’s EDH can help government keep data in fewer siloes to better track and analyze potential cyber threats. One of the main differentiators of Cloudera from other OSS offerings is its ability to provide secure management of data, which is a necessity for government.

In other words, Cloudera’s platform can enhance your organization’s data management while simultaneously strengthening cybersecurity infrastructures. This helps government easily deploy and manage the complex OSS to improve data management and expand innovation, while keeping your data and agency safe.

“When organizations implement Cloudera’s EDH into their core infrastructures they not only get to leverage leading open source technologies of today, but also future capabilities,” Laher said. “We continue to evaluate open source projects in the community and fold them into our platform as customer needs dictate. This creates an ever-evolving, best of breed platform that leverages the innovation taking place in the expansive open source ecosystem.”

The unification of CDM, cybersecurity, and big data has opened a world of possibilities for government. Cloudera is helping government agencies keep up with big data innovation while tackling their cybersecurity needs. Whether your agency needs a cost effective data management solution, advanced threat detection capabilities, or strengthened cybersecurity infrastructures, Hadoop-based EDH is the way of the future.