Why Infosec Practitioners are Turning into Data Scientists

Security practitioners cannot wait for the information they need to protect the enterprise, and thus the speed of delivery becomes a driving factor in the success or failure of the data-driven security enterprise. Because IT managers responsible for protecting the enterprise crown jewels—namely, data—face increasing threats against everything from fraudsters and data thieves all the way to up to nation-states, the need to react quickly to an imminent threat has never been more important. Speed is essential to just about everything: sports, online trading, moving data workloads from one place to another, mitigating security threats, getting to church on time—we could go on. However, as enterprises begin to realize the value of the data they collect, this data deluge has become more and more controlled by processes that are not focused on speed of change. Security practitioners cannot wait for the information they need to protect the enterprise, and thus the speed of delivery becomes a driving factor in the success or failure of the data-driven security enterprise. So many of them are doing something about it; they’re morphing into entirely different personalities.