Clearly, RIM-then/BlackBerry-now messed things up quite seriously and squandered its enviable position as leader of a large and rapidly growing market.  Arguably, they did so at about the worst possible time – just as mobile was becoming the dominant computing platform for millions of users. Compounding the problem, the company recognized their shortcomings, but then was late in delivering their next-generation handset and its enterprise platform.

 I spent some time at EMC World last week in Las Vegas.  As always, it was time well spent in informative sessions and in individual meetings – and, gauging by the difficulty of traversing the hallways between sessions and after keynotes, the show was very well attended.

Although my bent in visiting a show like this is normally geared more toward security, archiving, encryption and other topics related to what Osterman Research does, two of the major themes I took from the conference were the growing importance of Big Data in the context of improving security; as well as the need to view backup, archiving and disaster recovery along a continuum of data and information protection instead of individual point solutions.

With regard to the issue of Big Data and security, I believe that EMC and many others are correct in viewing Big Data as an important way to significantly improve the security of systems, networks, messaging and virtually every application on which we rely to get work done.  The issue of Big Data in a security context is a simple one: analyzing vast amounts of data from email, social media posts, transactions, various applications, location-generating systems and other data sources with the goal of determining when systems have been breached or are about to be.  The goal is less about preventing the ingress of bad guys and malicious content and more about analyzing the sometimes extremely subtle anomalies that occur when they do.  This is not to say that intrusion prevention or blocking content is irrelevant or futile, but rather that Big Data can be useful in keeping bad guys out, but more useful once they’re inside.