Visual analysis of corporate network intelligence: Abstracting and reasoning on yesterdays for acting today

This article proposes to go beyond the standard visualization application for security management, which is usually day-to-day monitoring. For this purpose, it introduces a pyramidal vision of the network intelligence and of the respective role of information visualization to support not only security engineers, but also analysts and managers. The paper first introduces our holistic vision and discusses the need to reduce the complexity of network data in order to abstract analysis and trends over time and further to convert decisions into actions. The article further introduces the analysis tasks we are currently tackling. The two following sections present two different ways to overview network data concentrating on specific dimensions of network security: user and application centric firstly, and alarm and temporal centric secondly. Finally this article concludes with the limitations and challenges introduced by our approach.