Looking Ahead at the 2015 Business Intelligence Landscape
The majority of federal IT managers are worried about security as they eye data migrations to the cloud. That’s hardly surprising, given the number of high-profile attacks in the past 12 months.
What is surprising, though, is what they see as the top challenge with their currently available data center security solutions: Integration ranked as the most cited challenge, according to MeriTalk.
MeriTalk surveyed more than 300 federal IT leaders for its free report, “Heart of the Network: Data Center Defense.” Forty-one percent said integration was a challenge with data center security tools. The survey didn’t dig into why that might be, but 36 percent of those surveyed said their organization should invest in encryption for data in motion.
“Particularly with mission-critical systems, Feds want assurance they can integrate with legacy tools, and easily migrate data between the two,” Mike Younkers, director, US Federal Systems Engineering at Cisco, told HS Today. “Open source opens up new options. And, Feds using open source are reporting positive results.”
Overall, there’s a good deal of angst over security problems, with most of that likely related to cloud infrastructure. More than two-thirds of respondents were concerned about securing their cloud infrastructure.
There are probably good reasons for that. More cloud data breaches ranked as one of Forrester’s more ominous 2015 predictions. On the other hand, there’s reason to worry about the data in legacy systems. While they generally gave their own agencies a passing grade for security as part of data center modernization (72 percent), when they were asked to consider improvement areas, 70 percent expressed doubts about their data centers’ security. And since 2009, the number of breaches reported on federal computer networks has nearly doubled, the report notes.
Webinars:
Tuesday, February 10, 10 a.m. PST, “Top 10 Business Intelligence Trends for 2015.” Representatives from Tableau Software, which sells a widely used data visualization tool, will discuss data governance, cloud analytics, data journalism and other big BI topics for the new year.
Tuesday, February 10, 4 p.m., EST, “Moving Targets: Harnessing Real-time Value from Data in Motion.” This week’s The Briefing Room episode features David Loshin, president of Knowledge Integrity, Inc., and visual analytics vendor Datawatch. The discussion will focus on how streaming data is changing business processes and pace.
Thursday, February 12, 10 a.m. PST. “Become a Digital Enterprise by Connecting Your Front and Back Office.” A team from integration vendor Jitterbit will share customer success stories for integrating ERP systems with front-end applications and demo Jitterbit.
Thursday, February 12, 10 a.m. PST. “Machine Learning for business users and enterprise developers.” Gigaom Research Director Andrew Brust will moderate a discussion on machine learning with The Cloud of Data founder Paul Miller, consultant Lynn Langit and Microsoft’s Product Management Director Herain Oberoi. Among the topics will be how to integrate machine learning functionality into line-of-business applications.
Loraine Lawson is a veteran technology reporter and blogger. She currently writes the Integration blog for IT Business Edge, which covers all aspects of integration technology, including data governance and best practices. She has also covered IT/Business Alignment and IT Security for IT Business Edge. Before becoming a freelance writer, Lawson worked at TechRepublic as a site editor and writer, covering mobile, IT management, IT security and other technology trends. Previously, she was a webmaster at the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet and a newspaper journalist. Follow Lawson at Google+ and on Twitter.
