Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with JR Reagan, Federal Chief Innovation Officer at Deloitte Services (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What do you think is the state of the union vis-à-vis visualization technologies? I heard from several people that there are gaps in visualization technologies. You are saying you are primarily using open source technologies, and you have developed your own internal framework. Talk about what is driving those choices and what you are trying to accomplish.

JR Reagan: The good news is that we have seen a lot of tools, and the ability to use them getting democratized really fast. Tableau is a great example of one that people can learn pretty quickly and do amazing things with. That side of the house – the analysts, cheaper tools, the tools that can do things quicker – is progressing well.

Where we lack sophistication, because it is still hard and requires custom coding, is around the mash-up side of the house – when I want to create a geospatial map and layer on top some social media and some advanced analytics. That still takes a level of expertise. That is where we have to craft our own tools. But that is where the problems lie. We can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel, though, because we can see that everyone has a geospatial ability on their desktop now. That used to be the realm of experts. I think there are lots of different things appearing now wherein we will start to see a collision or a combination of those. Users, whether they are sophisticated or not, will be able to solve their own hypotheses of, “What if I layer these things on top, what does that produce?” even without a sophisticated knowledge of all the underlying data structures. That is where I think we are going.

SM: If you look at problems you would like to solve in the realm of visualization, where would you like to see entrepreneurs focus?

JR: One problem that is near and dear to my heart is cyber analytics and cyber security visualization. There are lots of different problems within that area. One is just scale that happens broadly across an organization. The ability to suck up all that information is an interesting thing. The second one is the speed at which cyber security stuff happens. It is really going to challenge big data to do the analytics on those edge points and quickly reveal those patterns and anomalies to act on them. It can’t remain how it is today, where we are just picking up the log files and shipping them over to some warehouse. By then it is hours, days, or weeks old, and it is not helpful.

Finally, there is the visualization aspect. What is the metaphor for cyber security going forward? It doesn’t always necessarily mean a map, because it is out there, it is a device traveling over a network. I heard somebody asking, “How do we visualize this when it used to be that the bad guys are out there and the good guys are in here, when all are on top of each other now?” The ability to do fast real-time at the edge analytics and the volume, velocity, and variety of that information is the next frontier.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with JR Reagan, Federal Chief Innovation Officer at Deloitte Services
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