TECH TALK
DR . AMR AWADALLAH Co-Founder & CTO , Cloudera
leaders of the modern world , those that didn ’ t fell behind . We believe the data revolution , i . e . using computers to make intelligent decisions ; will be far larger than the industrial revolution . Companies and countries that truly embrace the data revolution will be the leaders of the new world .
That said , a lot of the companies in the region are still using legacy database technologies which were good for the data problems we had 20 years ago ( mostly structured transactions , not that big scale wise , and most questions could simply be answered by SQL ). The reality of today is that we have a lot more data , many more types of data ( e . g . social media , mobile app logs , sensor networks , drone imagery , …) and we need to process that data in much more advanced ways ( predictive modelling , anomaly detection , social graph mining ,
etc ). Our vision for Cloudera is to be the leading platform provider for powering the data revolution .
Cloud adoption , virtualisation , big data and mobility have been big talking points for 2016 . How is Cloudera advising enterprises to best prioritise investments for 2017 across these operations to better streamline utilisation of customer insights and ensuring secure data storage solutions ? Our platform is a big data processing platform , so obviously we focus more on that aspect . As described above , we truly believe a data revolution is taking place and hence this should be at the top priority wise ( a lot of CEO / CIO surveys confirm that affirmation ). If you look at companies like Uber , Airbnb , Facebook , they revolutionised their respective industry ( transportation , accommodations , and media ) through their powerful use of data . That is exactly what we want to enable our customers to do , and it is exactly why it needs to be the number one priority on their list . Though most of our customers today deploy our platform as on premise enterprise software , we also have a version of our platform that runs entirely in the Cloud ( with Amazon , Google , and Microsoft Azure ).
With data leakages on the rise , especially as the region ’ s market begins to enter early maturity , what is the current landscape with avoiding data breaches ? With Intel we developed a new open source framework called Apache Spot , targeted exactly at this problem . Intel initially built this solution for their internal security to prevent hackers from getting any of their precious intellectual property around semiconductor technology . That solution is now open source with the Apache software foundation , supported by Cloudera and a number of other organisations ( e . g . Accenture ). What the solution does is collect a lot of signals from internal networks and analyse these signals using advanced machine learning techniques to detect anomalies . These anomalies are strange patterns in the data indicating that an attack might be taking place due to network endpoints with a communication pattern that is significantly off the norm .
How is Cloudera advising businesses to best utilise digital economics to exploit the value of digital business ? We truly believe in a future that is fully digital . At the rate that populations are growing around the world , and the expectations consumers have due to mobile devices , companies and governments will only be able to meet the demand if they become 100 % digital . We at Cloudera also believe that data will be the oil of the future . In other words , companies and governments that figure out how to proper leverage big data and artificial intelligence to their advantage will be the ones that prosper in the future . There is really no other way to scale going forward .
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