Designing a Business Intelligence Solution for Analyzing Security Data

Business Intelligence is a set of tools and applications that are widely deployed across major corporations today. An appropriate translation for “Business Intelligence” in Swedish is “beslutstöd”, and it clearly describes the purpose of such a solution, andt hat is to collect, compress, consolidate and analyze data from multiple sources, so that critical decisions can be made based on it hence the name “beslutstöd. The focusof Business Intelligence has been on business data, so that trends and patterns of sales, marketing, production and other business areas can be studied. In addition, based on the analysis business processes such as production can be optimized or financial data can be consolidated efficiently. These are only a few areas to mention where business intelligence provides considerable support to decision-makings. However, there is also a certain complexity associated with implementing a Business Intelligence solution. That means the implementation and operations costs can only be justified when critical business data is analyzed. This implies other important areas such as security, which are usually not evaluated. Nevertheless, security should in fact be considered important for companies, organizations and all those that deal with research, development, and innovations, which are the keys for those entities to continue to exist and thrive. On the other hand, research, development, and innovation might be just the sources that could attract intrusion attempts and other malicious activities in order to steal valuable data thus it is equally important to secure sensitive data. The purpose of this study is to show how Business Intelligence can be used to analyze certain security data, so that it can then be used to detect and identify potential threats, intrusion attempts, weak points, peculiar patterns, and highlight security weak spots. This essentially means Business Intelligence can be an efficient tool to protect invaluable intellectual properties of a company. Furthermore, security analysis becomes even more important when considering the rapid development in the technological field, and one good example of this is the introduction of so-called smart devices that are capable of handling a number of tasks automatically. Smart devices such as smart TV or mobile phone offer a variety of new features and in the process, they use an increased number of hardware and software components that produce volumes of data. Consequently, all these may i