Hello, I just started blogging here at CISCO Subnet. As you can tell, this is my very first post. To get started, I wanted to introduce myself so you know what you can expect from me over the next few weeks. Instead of starting with going in depth about my past, I decided to tell you about the blog first and also ask you to let me know what you want me to focus on in my future blog entries.
What will I be writing about in this blog?
This blog is not for me. It is for you. I will be writing about the topic of data visualization. Any aspect of it. Be that the more visualization oriented side of the topic, things like perception, or more security related questions. For example, I could imagine posting an article on how to identify DoS attacks in NetFlow logs. But again. I would like to ask for your input. Tell me what you want to hear about. What are your interests? What will make you come back here to follow me along for the next month?
Who am I?
My most recent career move was to found a ‘data visualization in the cloud’ company: PixlCloud.
I have been working in the log analysis world for a number of years. I started out as a researcher at IBM Research in Switzerland. I have done a bunch of work on intrusion detection systems, their accuracy, and analyzing their events. Logs or in general IT data has occupied a big part of my career. After dealing mostly with IDSs and firewalls at IBM Research, I moved on to work for a SIEM (security information and event management) vendor – ArcSight. There I got a chance to not just look at IDS and firewall data, but pretty much any security relevant log that exists. After ArcSight, I moved on to work for Splunk, where I expanded my horizon yet some more. Instead of just looking at data for security or compliance purposes, I started dealing with topics like change management, application management, server management, and web analytics.
Over the years of dealing with all this textual data, I developed an interest – maybe even a fascination – for information visualization. The question of how you take a certain data set, generate a graphical representation and then get actionable knowledge has bugged me for years. At some point I got frustrated with the visualization tools that are available and I started writing my own tool with a then co-worker of mine, Christian. AfterGlow became my best friend to quickly visualize a number of different logs that I had floating around. This was the time when I realized that I collected quite the body of use-cases for visualizing security data and I decided to approach Addison Wesley to write the book Applied Security Visualization.
