IBM's Watson (natural language processing, deduction, AI, inference and statistical modeling all served by a massively parallel POWER7 array of computers with a total of 2880 processors with 15TB RAM) beat the greatest Jeopardy players in three rounds over the past 3 days — and the matches weren't even close. Watson has shocked us, and now it's time to think: What's in it for the security professional?

The connection is easy to see. The complexity, amount of unstructured background information, and the real-time need to make decisions.

Forrester predicts that the same levels of Watson's sophistication will appear in pattern recognition in fraud management and data protection. If Watson can answer a Jeopardy riddle in real time, it will certainly be able to find patterns of data loss, clustering security incidents, and events, and find root causes of them. Mitigation and/or removal of those root causes will be easy, compared to identifying them . . .