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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