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Prescient protects travelers worldwide
EMC Isilon and Hadoop provide Big Data security analytics for improved traveler safety
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Customer
Prescient
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Industry
Traveler Safety, Security
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Offerings
EMC Isilon scale-out storage, Hortonworks Hadoop Distribution, vBlock
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Key Challenges
Curate and analyze massive volumes of data for millions of travelers worldwide, Deliver user-specific threat analysis around the clock
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Outcomes
Business continuity ensures personal safety, Substantial cost reductions with Hadoop, Global security intelligence in seconds
Challenges
Delivering Real-Time Security Alerts
Employees of government agencies and corporations who travel to certain regions face serious security risks—not only threats to business reputations or liability costs, but even loss of life. Prescient, a global provider of a full spectrum of intelligence, technology, and security offerings, is launching a mobile travel security application to address these risks. The application uses Big Data analytics to track the whereabouts of travelers worldwide and correlates that information with situational awareness to pinpoint safety risks.
For the application to be effective, Prescient must process huge amounts of structured and unstructured data, which grows by up to one terabyte per day. Prescient needed a Big Data infrastructure that could meet these extreme requirements and therefore keep its clients safe.
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Our Approach
Focusing on business goals
Mike Bishop, Managing Director and Chief Architect of Prescient brings an impressive military background to the Prescient offering. He, along with Mike Pasternack, Prescient Vice President of IT, whose background is in financial services and security, looked at HP and Dell, along with EMC, but chose to meet with Dan Kenneally from EMC. Together, the group held in-depth discussions about the company’s goals for the new product and the business.
To Bishop and Pasternack, the biggest differentiator between EMC and other vendors was the focus on understanding the company’s business goals rather than just jumping into a sales pitch. Bishop also toured the EMC production floor in Massachusetts and was very impressed with the attached R&D lab, which enables EMC to replicate error conditions and customize for customer requirements. Confidence in support and technical expertise was another key factor in Prescient’s decision to trust EMC as a business partner.
Prescient chose to invest in EMC Isilon scale-out storage to support its data lake after choosing a Hortonworks distribution model. The company chose Hortonworks because of its response to a use case regarding querying traveler locations based on proximity to known threats and its understanding of geospatial data analysis. The combination of, EMC Isilon and Hortonworks provided a more appropriate cost model for storing and processing data. Prescient also utilized a number of EMC professional services.
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“Isilon helps us control the cost of maintaining a data lake against which we’re constantly running analytics. For value and cost-effectiveness, there’s nothing that comes close to Isilon and Hadoop for analytics on a massive scale.”
Mike Bishop, Chief Systems Architect, Prescient
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Outcomes
Business continuity for personnel
The ability of Isilon and Hadoop to distribute data across multiple sites and ensure reliable data access enables Prescient to transform massive data volumes into an easy-to-understand visual heat map for mobile users. Travelers get instant alerts so they can steer clear of dangerous areas.
Substantial cost reductions with Hadoop
Isilon helps Prescient control the cost of maintaining and running analytics against its massive data lake. By using Isilon and Hortonworks for social media analytics and SAP HANA for advanced linguistics and geospatial analyses, Prescient expects to reduce data analytics costs by 84 percent.
Global security intelligence in seconds
EMC and VCE provide realtime data access and analysis via record I/O to provide Prescient with confidence that critical information is always available. The company can correlate emergency threats with traveler positions in real time and alert employees within seconds so they can act appropriately.
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