Fans of Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” will recall that the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything” is 42. That’s it. Just 42. The Ultimate Question itself may be unknown, but the answer is certain. It is 42. No context. No meaning. 42.
As the Big Data enterprise begins to produce more “answers,” it is important that we not accept the sort of context-free results that the massive computer named “Deep Thought” produced in Hitchhiker. Instead, we need to be able to compare one set of results to another to see where we stand, whether we’re talking about loss prevention, incident rates, video analytics or any other dimension of security.