The recent upgrade to the Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) Big Data Platform (BDP), projected to release in August 2016, will give cyber operators and analysts with a need to run custom analytics on specific data sets access to increase ad-hoc query capabilities and enable faster identification of cyber threats.
“What’s going to come out in August is the ability to essentially [move data] in the data cloud and be able to run custom analytics on top of it that can be mission-focused,” said Dave Mihelcic, chief technology officer, DISA. “[This data] will not necessarily interact with the rest of the cloud platform.”
The BDP update will enable operators to manage mission-focused data sets within the existing solution–running custom analytics against the specified data.
“The ability for operators to focus the queries against only the data supporting their mission will greatly decrease the time it takes to visualize the results as well as allow further drill down into each result set,” said Bob Landreth, BDP program manager.
BDP is the underlying architecture supporting the Cyber Situational Awareness Analytic Capabilities (CSAAC)–capabilities include: DoD Information Network (DODIN) operations and situational awareness, defensive cyber operations, anomaly detection, enhanced security, and more.
“We’re about to see quantum leaps in our ability to rapidly develop, deploy, and utilize analytics for CSAAC,” said Mihelcic.
The BDP environment is comprised of open source and unclassified components, and also leverages technology transfer from other DOD entities. This platform supports the correlation and visualization of multiple petabytes of data from DODIN sources.
“This addition to the BDP architecture will allow users to identify new cyber threats in a much timelier manner moving forward,” said Landreth.
