DARKNESS looms over the Internet. So says and IBM Philippines executive. Statistics shows that around 80 percent to 90 percent of data generated nowadays is actually “dark” data, Lope A. Doromal Jr. said on Tuesday.
“Our current IT [information-technology]systems are not really designed to process these [data],” said Doromal, chief technologist of IBM Philippines. “It’s dark to us because we don’t have visibilities to these data.”
Gartner, an American IT research and advisory company, defines dark data as “the information assets organizations collect, process and store during regular business activities, but generally fail to use for other purposes.”
Since dark data are unstructured and never analyzed most of the time, these data are used only in compliance purposes by businesses and organizations.
Doromal said these dark data became a “major driver” of IBM for producing technology that teaches computers to interpret these data in the same way people also assume and understand.
He cited the nuisances of IT securities from closed-circuit television cameras to firewall lags and posts on social media. Doromal explained during a roundtable that once people start to complain about these problems, traditional computer systems would have a difficulty to work on the glitches.
He added that through IBM’s question-answering computer system for cyber security, various loads of information are monitored from public sites over the Internet. The platform, which IBM calls Watson, would start picking up clues to understand what may be unstructured or wrong.
“It can [also] bring some alert and people can start acting on that information,” Doromal said.
IBM’s Watson boosts a security analyst’s ability to trace and understand sophisticated threats, he added.
Unstructured data from millions of security blogs, online forums and white papers are tapped for checking threats unseen by other systems. The data are then connected with local security offenses, Doromal explained.