Our last but not least guest blog on "Why I Love Big Data Partner Series" is up! If you are on your way back home from Cisco Live, this would be a great read for your commute. Rob Rosen from Platfora will take us through how easy it is to uncover previously hidden threats with an integrated big data solution that dynamically analyzes large volumes of disparate security data from Cisco's security portfolio. If you missed Cisco Live this year, Rob also did a great job summarizing some of the key highlights.

Rob Rosen, Sr. Director Partner Solutions at Platfora, is responsible for developing Big Data solutions within Platfora's partner community including Cisco, Hadoop distribution providers and Platfora's growing channel partner team. Rob has worked in leadership capacities with technology leaders in the infrastructure and Big Data space including MapR Technologies, NetApp, Check Point Software and Sun Microsystems.

Highlights from Cisco Live: Top Insights from Platfora

It was a jam-packed week at Cisco Live and I had the opportunity to dive into the latest developments around big data analytics and security. It's well known that as IT infrastructure has transferred to virtual cloud-based applications and storage, organizations need visibility and security to keep their assets and data safe. I saw a lot of impressive presentations and I was able to share our own technology in partnership with Cisco.

Highlights from this week's conference:

• John Chambers' keynote: Everyone's talking about it-and for good reason. As he welcomed the crowd to Cisco Live, Chambers focused on exactly how businesses get disrupted in the digital age. He urged attendees and organizations to not hesitate to scrutinize their IT infrastructure and adopt the new technologies they'd see at the conference.
•  Collaboration across companies:There was a huge ecosystem of technology companies that partnered with Cisco for a presence at the event. It's encouraging to see that these tech giants across all industries are collaborating with one another to develop more comprehensive solutions for customers. Cisco's leading the pack as it models an inclusive approach built on partnerships-which is better for everyone in the long run.
• Cisco Intercloud announcement:This is a particularly exciting partnership announcement for Platfora. Cisco's Intercloud Ecosystem could be described as a hybrid "cloud of clouds." For anyone looking to pull value from their stored data, manage files or do a huge variety of other vital business tasks, this development is huge.

Platfora's Chalk Talk on Security

With major data security breaches making big news over the past couple of years, powerful products like Intercloud will enable companies to adequately fight back. However, there are major challenges faced when trying to detect data breaches, and our "chalk talk" session revealed how Platfora has solved the problem for so many companies. Here are few highlights around what I shared at the session:

• When it comes to data breaches, it's not a matter of if, but when
  • 2014 is now known as the "year of the data breach"
  • Over the past two years, we've seen unprecedented growth in the number of security breaches enabled by "low and slow" attacks against companies involving carefully crafted strategies aimed specifically at those organizations
• Big data security is inherently limited by infrastructure
  • Data exists in silos; petabytes of data are hard for most organizations
  • The average data breach takes 243 days and it's tough to recognize patterns over such a long time
• Big data extends the awareness horizon with Hadoop and Platfora
  • Hadoop offers a highly scalable, cost-effective data storage solution for security log data
  • Platfora's schema-on-read approach enables high analytical fidelity and greater insight capture
  • Platfora's native-to-Hadoop analytics enables rapid insight from a wide variety of data sources
• Rapid workflow iteration drives threat detection
  • Data arrives in minutes with Platfora and security analysts can ask the right questions of big data to discover attack sequences in advance
  • Using Platfora's security analytics, questions can be asked quickly and iteratively from the data to detect irregular patterns and prevent security breaches

As Cisco's Intercloud grows, businesses are going to be able to use Platfora to pull data instantly from a huge number of applications. If you'd like to learn more details, I've written more about Platfora's security analytics solution in a recent blog post here.

The customer truly benefits from a joint Platfora and Cisco solution because UCS offers the best infrastructure for Platfora to satisfy its customer's needs. Platfora can offer timed insight and analytics to its customers when we have a scalable, high-performance infrastructure underneath us. UCS offers this infrastructural solution by enabling the storage of petabytes of data to meet Platfora's customer expectations. Secondly, Platfora is an in-memory technology allowing users to get access to data very quickly by using technologies like Apache Spark to take advantage of memory. UCS enables us to have access to all that memory because it scales vertically as well. Finally UCS offers our customers the opportunity to administer systems, scale-out easily, and maintain them.

Thanks to Cisco for hosting an amazing week of knowledge sharing and new technologies. I already can't wait for next year.