MacAulay-Brown’s Enlighten IT Develops Big Data Tool Set for Data Scientists

MacAulay-Brown, Inc. (MacB) has announced that Enlighten IT Consulting, a MacB subsidiary, has developed a comprehensive analytic solution, called RAPID, for use by big data scientists. RAPID helps experts obtain critical insight from complex Defense Department information network data that’s essential for cybersecurity national defense. Similar analyst tools have been developed for smaller datasets, but RAPID is scalable to effectively handle petabytes of data.

During prototype testing in Enlighten’s cyber laboratory, company experts found that RAPID could handle billions of events across multiple feature sets, and that immediate deployment of analytics on a big data platform does not have to be done in isolation. RAPID allows data scientists to collaborate in the same web-based environment, and provides analysts with a notebook to test, develop, scale, and deploy with quick turnaround. The solution utilizes common languages and interfaces including Structured Query Language (SQL), Python, and Apache Spark to perform machine learning. Importantly, it also contains multiple security layers to limit individual access to different sets of DOD data, thus tightly controlling security information at the cell level.

“Our RAPID analytic solution is a game-changer, filling a critical gap that data scientists have when working with petabytes of data,” said Duane Shugars, Enlighten’s senior vice president and general manager. “This work also complements the development of our recent Cyber Learning Engine tool as the next step in transforming MacB’s Defensive Cyber Operations for the protection of our Nation.”