Wall Street & Technology is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Data Management

03:37 PM
50%
50%

Is Your SysAdmin Actually A Data Scientist?

Data scientists are hard to find, but you may already have someone on your team who performs the duties of a true data guru.

"Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value." -- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

It is highly likely that you, right now, have a platform for Big Data analysis inside your institution. You probably also have at least one individual who is highly skilled at monitoring, searching, analyzing, visualizing and acting on unstructured streams of critical business data. The unstructured data is the record of activity and behavior of your customers, users, transactions, applications and IT infrastructure. The individual is probably the IT operations guru assigned to Splunk Enterprise.

Are you using Splunk? The chances are very good that you are -- according to its website, Splunk includes over 300 financial institutions among their clients. Splunk claims to "turn machine data into real-time operational intelligence," but most folks think of it as the systems management application that gathers up all of those application logs, configuration files, operating systems metrics, syslog data file and so on. It is what it does with the data that has made it one of the hottest products in the data center. By enabling correlations among all that collected data, Splunk provides the analytical firepower needed for application troubleshooting, investigating security incidents and monitoring service-level compliance.

This is only the beginning of what Splunk can do, however. Creative organizations are using Splunk to grow their business by analyzing customer usage patterns and geographical trends. The latest version, Splunk Enterprise 6, provide additional analytics and a new interface that allows users to manipulate, analyze and visualize data without needing to understand the format of the underlying raw machine data.

Before beginning the difficult (and expensive) search fro a data scientist, CIOs would be well-served to ask "where is that guy (or gal) who is fixing the motorcycle?"

Jennifer L. Costley, Ph.D. is a scientifically-trained technologist with broad multidisciplinary experience in enterprise architecture, software development, line management and infrastructure operations, primarily (although not exclusively) in capital markets. She is also a ... View Full Bio
More Commentary
A Wild Ride Comes to an End
Covering the financial services technology space for the past 15 years has been a thrilling ride with many ups as downs.
The End of an Era: Farewell to an Icon
After more than two decades of writing for Wall Street & Technology, I am leaving the media brand. It's time to reflect on our mutual history and the road ahead.
Beyond Bitcoin: Why Counterparty Has Won Support From Overstock's Chairman
The combined excitement over the currency and the Blockchain has kept the market capitalization above $4 billion for more than a year. This has attracted both imitators and innovators.
Asset Managers Set Sights on Defragmenting Back-Office Data
Defragmenting back-office data and technology will be a top focus for asset managers in 2015.
4 Mobile Security Predictions for 2015
As we look ahead, mobility is the perfect breeding ground for attacks in 2015.
Register for Wall Street & Technology Newsletters
Video
5 Things to Look For Before Accepting Terms & Conditions
5 Things to Look For Before Accepting Terms & Conditions
Is your corporate data at risk? Before uploading sensitive information to cloud services be sure to review these terms.