Government Big Data Solutions Award Nominee: Wayne Wheeles (Sherpa Surfing) by AlexOlesker

The Government Big Data Solutions Award was established to highlight innovative solutions and facilitate the exchange of best practices, lessons learned and creative ideas for addressing Big Data challenges. The top five nominees and overall winner was announced at Hadoop World in New York City on November 8 2011.

The Government Big Data Solutions Award Program is coordinated by CTOLabs.com. The 2011 judging panel included: Doug Cutting, creator of Apache Hadoop and architect at Cloudera, Alan Wade, former CIA and IC CIO, Ryan LaSalle, Director of Accenture Cyber R & D, Ed Granstedt, Senior VP Director of the QinetiQ Strategic Solutions Center and Chris Dorobek, founder, editor and publisher of DorobekInsider.com.

A top nominee this year was Wayne Wheeles for his open source cyber security solution Shera Surfing, which is currently in use for several DoD organizations to track network communications data. Shera Surfing provides cost effective scaling to handle Big Data by bringing in all available information in any form, fostering the sharing and exchange of analytics and techniques, operating at near real-time, and being question agnostic. The platform is built on top of the Cloudera Distribution of Hadoop and uses Hadoop’s unique abilities in data processing to take in packet captures of any format and analyse trends, geographical data, historical reference data, even malware and malware payloads. The Sherpa Surfing software allows users to write conditional alerts and notifications to be sent on data matches. It is in use at several DoD organizations in implementations ranging from 250 to 350 Terabytes of data.