Data Analytics

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Data analytics is the science of extracting patterns, trends, and actionable information from large sets of data. While often used interchangeably with the term “business intelligence,” it’s useful to distinguish the terms. Think of business intelligence as the ways in which companies use data to improve their management and operations. Data analytics involves improving your ways of making sense of that data before acting on it; further still, you can slice and dice the data to extract insights that allow you to leverage this data to give you and your organization a competitive advantage.

Data and information, generally, are proliferating at a veritably exponential rate, thanks to rapid increases in the Three Digital Accelerators I’ve been tracking since the early 1980s: bandwidth, digital storage, and processing power. The “big data” we have today will be nothing compared to the abundance of data and information available to us in the near future data generated by hundreds of millions of devices, things like wearable tech, smartphones, and anything that’s part of the Internet of Things (IoT).

Improving your capacity to analyze this data works at multiple stages from collection processes to organizing and communication techniques such as modeling and visualization. Yet, whereas data once required a large team of skilled analysts to be made useful, today there are a number of enterprise level tools for running high speed data analytics on massive amounts of data, as well as publically available free tools like Google Analytics that offer every business and entrepreneur the opportunity to incorporate data analytics when making decisions.

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​​Data Center Technology

Data center is a facility that centralizes an organization’s IT operations and equipment, as well as where it stores, manages, and disseminates its data. Data centers house a network’s most critical systems and are vital to the continuity of daily operations. Consequentially, the security and reliability of data centers and their information is a top priority for organizations.

Although data center designs are unique, they can generally be classified as internet-facing or enterprise (or “internal”) data centers. Internet-facing data centers usually support relatively few applications, are typically browser-based, and have many users, typically unknown. In contrast, enterprise data centers service fewer users, but host more applications that vary from off-the-shelf to custom applications.

Data center architectures and requirements can differ significantly. For example, a data center built for a cloud service provider, satisfies facility, infrastructure, and security requirements that significantly differ from a completely private data center, such as one built for the Pentagon that is dedicated to securing classified data.

Regardless of classification, an effective data center operation is achieved through a balanced investment in the facility and equipment housed. The elements of a data center break down as follows:

Facility – the location and “white space,” or usable space, that is available for IT equipment. Providing round-the-clock access to information makes data centers some of the most energy-consuming facilities in the world. A high emphasis is placed on design to optimize white space and environmental control to keep equipment within manufacturer-specified temperature/humidity range.

Support infrastructure – equipment contributing to securely sustaining the highest level of availability possible. The Uptime Institute defined four tiers data centers can fall under, with availability ranging from 99.671% to 99.995%. Some components for supporting infrastructure include:

• Uninterruptible Power Sources (UPS) – battery banks, generators and redundant power sources.

• Environmental Control – computer room air conditioners (CRAC), heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, and exhaust systems.

• Physical Security Systems – bio metrics and video surveillance systems.

IT equipment – actual equipment for IT operations and storage of the organization’s data. This includes servers, storage hardware, cables and racks, as well as a variety of information security elements, such as firewalls.

Operations staff – to monitor operations and maintain IT and infrastructural equipment around the clock.

Data centers have evolved significantly in recent years, adopting technologies such as virtualization to optimize resource utilization and increase IT flexibility. As enterprise IT needs continue to evolve toward on-demand services, many organizations are moving toward cloud-based services and infrastructure. A focus has also been placed on initiatives to reduce the enormous energy consumption of data centers by incorporating more efficient technologies and practices in data center management. Data centers built to these standards have been coined “green data centers.”

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Information System Security

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Technology today has move forward in leaps and bounds in the last couple of years. This has created new opportunities for jobs, entertainment, how we go about our daily lives, and even organize the vast wealth of information at our fingertips. With all this information constantly being exchanged any given day, companies and organizations have had to step up their game too. Information systems security is a big part of keeping security systems for this information in check and running smoothly.

When people think of security systems for computer networks, they may think having just a good password is enough. The truth is a lot more goes into these security systems then what people see on the surface.

Throughout time information has always been stolen, bartered, or taken for personal gain or greed. There is an exchange of digital information going on all the time throughout the world. Every time someone swipes a card, logs into their e-mail, or a million other things that can happen, is an exchange of digital information. Just like physical information, this information can be stolen and used for personal gain or greed.

Information systems security is very important to help protect against this type of theft. Companies and organizations are especially vulnerable since they have a wealth of information from their employees. This can include names, addresses, telephone numbers, social security numbers, payrolls, etc. This information is sensitive and needs to be protected. Not to mention many companies and organizations today have an IT and security department to oversee their network systems.

The main focus of this industry is to protect these systems and to prevent the information from being stolen too. People in this industry can be involved with several tasks including raising user awareness, improving existing security systems, and in some cases even investigating security breaches too.