Cody McBride is our guest today. He’s a trained IT technician who offers easy-to-understand technical advice. Here’s a post he wrote explaining how streaming analytics can protect your business online. Take it away, Cody!
Technological advances increase the cybersecurity threats your business’s website faces. Fortunately, they also allow you to make your site more secure.
One of the most recent tech services to hit the market is streaming analytics, which allows data to be analyzed on the fly, while it happens. As a business intelligence tool, it has the potential to be a game-changer for many businesses. Because it can process millions of events per second, it can help identify risks and opportunities faster than traditional data-processing tools, allowing for quick decision-making and action based on real-time information. Along with presenting amazing opportunities for growth and revenue, it can also protect your company by identifying cyber threats as they come in.
How It’s Used
Although experts caution that it’s not a one-size-fits-all tool, streaming analytics (also called stream processing, event processing, or complex event processing) is used in a wide variety of applications, including the following.
- Traffic monitoring
- Smart patient care
- Stock market surveillance
- Smart devices
- Intrusion, surveillance, and fraud detection
What It Does
Streaming analytics provides businesses with superior security protection because it can detect threat patterns by rapidly analyzing and connecting events while monitoring their network and physical assets. It helps companies perform risk analysis by providing the real-time data they need to make decisions about how and when to take action. It also allows them to make sure their websites and data are secure by analyzing threats and identifying areas where sensitive information is not adequately protected or if federal and state regulations are not being met.
Though often these attacks are targeted towards specific hosts, your business can be affected indirectly if your internet or cloud service provider has been targeted.Who Provides It
The list of stream processing providers is ever-expanding, and several major open-source players already offer this service:
- Apache (Storm, Spark, Flink, and Samza)
- Hadoop
- Azure Streaming Analytics
- SQLstream
- Oracle Stream Analytics
- IBM Streams
- SAP Event Stream Processor
- Informatica
Although the concept of fraud detection, patient monitoring, stock ticker analysis, traffic monitoring, and other such analysis is not new, services like these have opened up real-time streaming analytics to vast numbers of small to mid-sized companies that previously would not have been able to afford the costs.
How to Get It
Today with cloud-based services, such applications are much simpler to develop without the purchase and maintenance of computer hardware but rather by purchasing software on a pay-as-you-go basis. However, though all of this is more accessible than it has been in the past, it is still not an easy task for an average business professional to get up and running.
Implementation requires a level of coding and knowledge of the services, so you may need to hire a website developer like Pink Toad Studio or a cybersecurity specialist (you can find freelancers to help bring it all together). To find the right freelancer for the job, check out online reviews. It may cost a bit upfront (including the time it’ll take to employ the system). However, these costs are a fraction of what they might have been 10 years ago or what it could cost you in the event of a serious cyberattack or data breach.
There are many great tools and services available to protect your company’s website from the latest cyber threats, but streaming analytics is a BI tool that offers incredible benefits to your business that go above and beyond security alone. Combining this service with the latest in virus/malware detection, firewalls, endpoint security, and network access control empowers your business to focus on getting your products and services out to your customers.
Cody McBride’s love for computers stems from high school when he built his own computer.Today he is a trained IT technician and knows how the inner workings of computers can be confusing to most. He is the creator of TechDeck.info where he offers easy-to-understand tech related advice and troubleshooting tips.
