An Open Letter to Data Teams

If you’re on a data science or BI team, this letter is addressed to you.

Hi, it’s your friends from security. It’s been a while since we spoke and that’s what this letter is about.

See, lately we’ve been feeling down. It seems like everyone is getting hacked and if that happened to us it would terrible. Game over. But there’s so much we need to do and most days we’re just putting out fires. We wish there was more time for us to research attack trends, sharpen our skills and keep up with the bad guys.

It’s not like we haven’t been rolling out the latest cybersecurity tools. Our budgets are bigger than ever but too often the solutions we buy make more work for us with noisy alerts and reports.

Would you be willing to help us out?

We hear about data science all the time, like how our product and marketing teams are killing it with big data analytics. And we know they’re not doing it alone- you’re helping them get results.

Us security people come from a technical background. We’re not afraid of getting our hands dirty and maybe that’s why we’ve been going it alone. But we’re not super at SQL, not proficient in percentiles, not comfortable with clustering.

If you’re open to partnering with us on protecting the company, we’ll still do our share. We can tell you about challenges and opportunities for detecting threats, finding risky configurations, reporting on observability, removing excessive permissions.. we have a good sense of the questions that need to be asked and the insights we need to protect the company.

We also know where you can get the data for the analytics and it doesn’t need to go into a system that you’re not using today. Keep using whatever big data analytics solution you use every day. Just use it to help us out.

What do you say?