Collecting data is crucial for any type of business. The data collected can help decision making processes, improve customer success, increase security in the organization and more. There are so many areas that would benefit from data collection that we would need a separate blog post just to list them.
Investing time and money into running surveys and experiments, using software for gathering data, and then having all that potentially valuable information sitting in a database –considering that storing data also has a cost– is not really a wise decision.
That being said, I am not suggesting that we should stop gathering data because it is too expensive, but rather that we should approach the data collection process wisely, dedicating time to plan what type of data we need. There are many valuable statistical methods that can help with that, such as, value of information. Value of information gives us algorithms to decide which data collection strategy would be the most optimal to support the decision making process.
Data collection alone is not enough. We need to be sure that the data collected comes in the right format, that the tools are not wrongly calibrated, or that we have some strange bug in the software for collecting the data. We also need to ensure that appropriate validation methods are put in place to ensure the data itself is of high quality and that it reliably captures the intended information. This way we can trust and rely on what we have collected.
Once we have the data, and we are sure they are of good quality, organizations need to make the best use of data scientists, statisticians, and subject matter experts, to build models and get useful information and insight from the data. Let experts run the analytics, interpret the results, and build dashboards. Having qualified experts run the analytics is most important.
At Praxis Security Labs, we consider data collection and analysis. We are a multidisciplinary team of experts and we can help your organization in making the best usage of the security data you collect. Contact us to learn more.