Data as a Decisionmaker

• By Ralph C. Jensen
• Feb 01, 2015

The best way to make any decision is by collecting as much data as possible. The more information you have, the better your decision will be.

Ajay Jain, president of Quantum Secure, points out in our cover story that security decisions are based on data. The more you have, the better the decisions. However, Jain points out that is not always the case, in part, because of the amount of data being collected by an increasing number of devises.

“More than 95 percent of alarms are false,” Jain said. “We tend to respond slowly because there is a good chance that the alarm isn’t valid.”

I think you will find Jain’s comments and analysis very interesting. Consider this: “The patterns or trends that result from analyzing the data help identify certain predictors that could indicate that an incident may occur.”

This could be huge, considering the amount of data that is stolen year after year. Insider threats are increasingly prevalent, and some statistics reveal that insider threats are responsible for nearly half of all security breaches.

Also inside, one of our freelance writers interviewed Tom Galvin, president of Razberi Technologies, who addressed questions about IP networking. He said networking has been around for a long time, but for the security industry, its lifespace has been about a decade.

Galvin takes no credit for investing IP networking, megapixel cameras or an NVR, but what they have put together is a way to combine all these things into a simplified package. Razberi Technologies has been able to take the complexity of IP networking and put the technology into simplified form factors. This helps the security integrator do their job at a lower cost.

How is this all completed?

“Razberi has brought the market the concept of a distributed architecture where they have the server in a distributed environment and closer out to the edge; a practice that has not been done as much with the industry move to centralization,” said Reinier Tuinzing, strategic alliance manager at Milestone Systems, America.

From this partnership, Milestone Systems has been able to pull the information collected on the ServerSwitch back to an operation center and make the entire network function.

This article originally appeared in the February 2015 issue of Security Today.