Cognyte I Actionable Intelligence for a Safer World 8 But extracting these insights is no simple feat. The incredible variety of sources, the vast amount of data,, and the fragmentation of this data all create significant roadblocks. This is all the more frustrating since this data should be used as a strategic asset, yet much of the data that security organizations have access to is overlooked, unmined, and untapped for analytics. UNSTRUCTURED DATA Unstructured data is not structured according to established data models and cannot be easily captured in relational databases. This category is vast and includes just about everything not included in structured data (i.e., photos, videos, emails, reports, log files, social media posts, satellite imagery, and sensor data, among others). This phenomenon is just as true and relevant with perpetrators as it is with ordinary citizens. Using analytics, the potential exists for security organizations to sift through the massive amounts of data to gain a deeper view into a perpetrator’s intentions and actions, uncover hidden patterns and connections, and reach insights that would be impossible to find manually. THE VARIETY, VOLUME AND FRAGMENTATION OF DATA POSE TOUGH CHALLENGES The world is overflowing with digital experiences, and the byproduct of this is our growing digital footprint. As research firm IDC reports, “Today, more than 5 billion consumers interact with data every day – by 2025, that number will be 6 billion, or 75% of the world’s population. In 2025, each connected person in the world on average will have a digital data engagement over 4,900 times per day – that’s about 1 digital interaction every 18 seconds.” 8 Data variety refers to the tremendous diversity of data types that must be collected and analyzed for investigations, especially by government security organizations. In order to gain a deep understanding of a perpetrator’s activities and intentions, investigative teams must fuse together data from varied sources, including government databases, such as criminal records and vehicle records, as well as the web, financial transactions, flight records, ship movements, and many other sources. And this diversity continues to grow as new sources pop up, from digital wallets to chatbots. Not only does the data from each source come in a multitude of different types and formats, an estimated 80% of the data generated today is unstructured data. The inherent nature of unstructured data makes it much more challenging to process and mine for insights than structured data. VARIETY According to John Edwards, CIO of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, the variety of data that security organizations analyze is vast and much broader than most companies. He adds that “the data sets are probably among the most complex in the world.” 12 TREND 2: DATA IS GROWING RAPIDLY AND IS HIGHLY FRAGMENTED, MAKING IT HARDER TO CONNECT THE DOTS