The NSA And Big Data: What IT Can Learn

Enterprises can put the tools Big Brother uses to analyze our online activities to productive use. Here's how.

Whatever your civil liberties stance, the technologies underpinning the National Security Agency's data collection and analysis programs, such as PRISM, spell opportunity for companies looking to connect a different set of dots -- identifying potential customers, spotting fraud or cybercrime in its early stages, or improving products and services.

The pillars of the NSA's architecture are big data systems, particularly a distributed data store called Accumulo, machine learning and natural language processing software, and scale-out cloud hardware (we delve into all three in much more depth in our full report).