Application security gets automated: Machine learning boosts financial services

As the wide range of technologies that fall under the banner of "Big Data" begin to mature and become ubiquitous, the next stage of development of the analytics stack is machine learning. Beyond its role in making better sense of data, however, machine learning has an increasingly critical role to play in application security, particularly in areas like financial services. With increased security focus turning toward one of the prime sources for exploitation--commercial and homegrown code--the tooling around application security is getting smarter and bringing the rest of the monitoring stack up to speed through automation. For data-driven organizations, which include almost any Fortune 500 company, maintaining the security of their critical applications is equivalent to locking down some of their most valuable assets. With a wide set of applications spanning departments and even different clusters or infrastructure, this is no small task.