Capgemini launches Anomalous Behaviour Detection with Pivotal

Capgemini has announced, with Pivotal, the company at the intersection of big data, PaaS, and agile development, the launch of an offer to help companies address advanced threats to the enterprise. Anomalous Behaviour Detection provides a reactive and predictive approach to help enterprises identify and respond appropriately to both internal and external threats. Using the architecture of a Business Data Lake[1] to analyse vast amounts of structured and unstructured information, the offer brings together Capgemini’s big data and analytics capabilities with Pivotal’s data science services and software.

Companies are now more vulnerable to internal and external risks due to rising data volumes, the added complexity of the cloud, and the increasing amount of information companies share with third parties. Often the greatest threats come from employees operating within their approved authority and security permissions who either have their credentials compromised, or who go ‘rogue’ and start to misuse internal systems, as witnessed in the Snowden affair in 2013. This can expose companies to data leakage, critical Intellectual Property (IP) and financial breaches, and abuse of company systems.

Traditional signature-based security tools are not able to counter the threat of anomalous behaviour from internal and trusted third parties, because they are not geared to detecting people operating within their approved business role. Pivotal and Capgemini’s new offer provides a way to detect and even predict possible fraud, or theft of data and IP. It goes beyond existing, traditional security tools to provide a behaviour-centric approach allowing both ‘rogue’ employees and compromised accounts or devices to be identified quickly. This approach also allows an enterprise to create insights, categorise risk and create alerts so that the enterprise can react swiftly and appropriately.

Detecting anomalous behaviour with a Business Data Lake allows Capgemini and Pivotal to provide tailor-made solutions that respond to the customer’s specific needs, which can be scaled as required. By applying innovative data science techniques to huge volumes of data, enterprises can detect atypical behaviour patterns fast, and take action before a threat becomes critical. This means enterprises can now take an adaptive approach to abnormal behaviour, such as informing management, adjusting policies or reducing or removing access rights, thus avoiding a complete systematic shutdown each time there is a breach.

Franck Greverie, Global Head of Cyber Security and Corporate Vice President for the Capgemini Group, said: “Companies are ever more aware that the primary threats are often from within the company systems – be it through social engineering attacks or “rogue” employees – so detecting anomalous behaviours quickly is key. We have already seen a high level of interest in this new offer from multiple customers, particularly in the financial and utilities sectors, wishing to protect their internal data.”

Annika Jimenez, Vice President, Pivotal said: “Pivotal is pleased again to collaborate with Capgemini in extending the value of the Business Data Lake through delivery of an important use case: “Anomalous Behaviour Detection”. This is one of many examples of Pivotal’s big data and analytics platform, which when combined with data science and Capgemini services, can solve problems that couldn’t be solved before. Our combined technologies, open source data science toolsets and people can generate game-changing results for our customers – in terms of business capabilities, operating efficiencies, new revenue opportunities, even create new markets entirely. And we’re excited to extend it here to lower critical business risk – a true game changer.”

Capgemini and Pivotal are already working together with a number of customers in this field such as financial services, utilities, retailers and manufacturing companies to provide a managed service capability. The launch is an extension of the Pivotal/Capgemini collaboration announced in December 2013.