A Cyber Defense with the Alteryx Platform

[AlteryxAdvocacy]

Author:

Andrew Kim

Role:

Senior Manager

Company:

Data Meaning

Overview of Use Case

With data breaches becoming more common and expensive, companies are faced with the challenge of trying to better identify how to detect and prevent a breach. Data Meaning is using the complete Alteryx platform to assess cyber security defense and create a structure to monitor and prevent breaches based on descriptive analytics.

Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve

Our objective was to address a cyber security concern that every company has. A data breach. Understanding how data breaches occur was the focal point of our efforts because it's one of the easier aspects to prevent and not many third parties are helping you do it. We saw tech indicators could be leveraged in prevention, so our solution included a way to monitor the different pieces to prevent, detect, and if necessary, respond to internal data breaches.

Describe your working solution

The average time from breach to containment is around 253 days. When looking at this time period, we focused our efforts on containment, given the potential to reduce breach time and limit the impact to a company.

Our solution incorporates the entire Alteryx platform, developing a comprehensive system to prevent, detect, and respond to internal threats an organization may face. In Server, we review a complete historical picture based on all the metadata that exists within Alteryx, which is blended with various logs in a workflow. From Connect, we can discern the complete history of traffic, the content metadata, and assess the completeness of our various data sources. This serves as the baseline data for normal activity. We tie in Promote to uncover dark spots in flat files or code by mining and assessing usage, run time and associations with other systems. Once we have all the indicators established, we have the framework to identify major changes to normal activity to better triage a potential breach. 

Describe the benefits you have achieved

Alteryx enables organizations with an in-house, cost effective solution to identify and prevent data breaches.

The best thing we can do is reduce risk because a breach is inevitable, right? We're all under that assumption now. It's going to happen at some point and if we take a proactive approach, it can control the risk and reduce the associated cost by speeding our response time in a breach scenario. If a beach is contained in less than 30 days, the costs are reduced significantly. When I say significantly, it's normally around 50%, so by rolling the clock back 30 days, your Alteryx license could be worth millions. As cyber security continues to be of principal importance to every company, Alteryx provides a unique solution to ensuring your data is safe and secure.