Banks are drowning in data. Optimising data warehousing,
mining and analysis allows banks to turn data into more useful
intelligence. Looking to tap into what analysts have described as a
golden era for data management, US-start up Zettaset believes it
can be a game changer. Charles Davis reports.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Banks sit on mountains of data,
data seldom used in the fight against fraud. Fraudsters, meanwhile,
view data as the way in to a bank’s customers, an avenue for
exploitation that allows them to recede into the background.
In an unlikely, yet fortuitous,
development, some banks are beginning to employ deep-link analysis
– a method perfected by search engine companies to improve search
results – to look for questionable activities.
Promise lies in an open-source
solution, Hadoop, a fabulously powerful yet infamously complex deep
link analysis tool that can save financial institutions millions if
only they can unlock its power.
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By GlobalDataEnter Zettaset, a Mountain View,
California vendor that has created a plug-and-play solution that
allows banks to leverage Hadoop to monitor massive amounts of data
in real time in order to detect anomalies in terabytes of data to
detect suspect transaction patterns.
Leveling the playing
field
RBI spoke with Zettaset
CEO Brian Christian, and Tom Masucci, vice-president of development
and sales, to get a bird’s eye view of deep-link analysis, and the
potential to level the playing field against increasingly
sophisticated malware attacks.
Zettaset’s Security Data Warehouse
allows users to investigate petabytes of business and security data
for anomalies and potentially threatening patterns across an
organisation’s entire data footprint, Christian said.
“Like Amazon mines behaviour to
attract positive behaviours, bad actors can be identified utilising
big data,” Christian says. “Once bad actors know how to break into
a bank, they will keep doing it exactly the same way, over and
over, until they are stopped.”
Zettaset’s platform was created to
empower enterprises to simplify the use of Hadoop, giving them the
data management savvy needed to deploy the most sophisticated
fraud-mitigation and forensic solutions.
The Hadoop software library
framework – an open source project run by the Apache Foundation –
encompasses a staggering array of services developed largely by
programmers from Yahoo and is closely linked in the open source
community to Google as well, which constructed its MapReduce
platform on the same principles.
MapReduce, a distributed file
system that allows the search giant to return nearly instantaneous
search results, mines terabytes of data across computing
clusters.
The speed and scope of the Hadoop
system is staggering. The Hadoop framework has enabled Yahoo to
sort one petabyte of data within 16 hours – and one terabyte of
data in 62 seconds.
The library detects and addresses
failures at the application layer. Zettaset maximises this offering
by serving as a bridge to more than 30 Hadoop features in a single
system, as well as other open-source solutions from deep link apps
like Hive, Pig and Zookeeper.
Masucci says the platform can be
incorporated into an institution’s currently existing security
detection environment, or can be used as a standalone data
warehouse to store network events for compliance.
Zettaset’s real power lies in its
ability to enable users to mine data from a multitude of numerous
sources, including internal firewalls and security devices, but
also from website traffic, business processes and other day-to-day
transactions from within the institution.
“Users then can track patterns of
anomalies and visualise deficiencies through their existing
business intelligence tools,” Masucci says.
To date, most banks have leaned on
internally constructed data warehouses powered by relational
databases, which now are struggling to keep pace with the massive
investment needed to harness the torrent of new data flowing in
from hundreds of sources.
“We can ‘right-size’ the solution
so we are less expensive in the infrastructure as we grow,”
Christian says.
“The numbers are skewed towards us,
because our model allows the partner to hang on to the data while
we build the date store, for more insights and better analysis. The
value that business partners receive is built on the data warehouse
of the shared network.”
It has one high-profile bank
partner to date, Zions Bancorp, which is using Zettaset to identify
fraud and security risks in real time.
Christian and Masucci said that, in
around a week, Zettaset was able to deploy a multinode cluster set
up on Zions’ site with its software installed, all at a fraction of
the cost of a proprietary system.
Adding
partners
Now, Christian said, Zions can use
the most sophisticated link analysis techniques available to
examine structured data found in form fields, but also the
unstructured data, which is usually based in text and as such is
difficult for relational databases to reach.
The more partners, the bigger the
data store, so Zettaset’s mission these days is adding
partners.
“We are meeting in New York in a
few days with a large number of potential partners, and we are
confident that we will build quickly once we begin to scale.”
Big data offers the potential for
leveling the playing field in the never-ending battle against
fraudsters, who continue to perfect new ways to penetrate even the
most sophisticated financial institutions, Christian says.
The arms race of escalating
investment in proprietary systems makes less sense in today’s
economic environment, he added, because the priority these days has
to be on generating revenue.
New consumer channels such as
mobile payments simply add to the flow of data from remote
locations, so even as banks increase revenue opportunities, they
increase the potential for fraud.
“Think about 50m new handsets out
there, all potential gateways for the bad guys.
“We have to leverage each other, build massive data stores and
level the playing field a bit. We see spend in data just taking
off, and we are just at the beginning. It is the Industrial
Revolution applied to data.”
