Making a meaningful expression of network protection with visual innovations
Accenture Data Viz Tech Lab
Gained new work and funding for the lab by designing innovative war room data visualizations
Objective
Ensure data visualization experiments employ best-in-class principles so they are elegant, meaningful and usable for end users.
Key Activities
Collaborated closely with engineers and data scientists to explore leading-edge data analysis and visualizations.
Created data-driven products for various industries, such as visualizing cybersecurity threats.
Advised industry partners on how they might apply data visualization technologies to their offerings.
Outcomes
Innovated a novel security dashboard to monitor anomalous threats.
Aided winning new work and funding for larger scale projects.
Seeing a new, playful form of visualization encouraged clients to think creatively and differently about how we might visualize their data.
Through rapid pair-programming, guerrilla user testing and the application of fundamental data visualization principles, this evocative visualization became a meaningful expression of network protection.
The security shield indicates potential threats to the network as a whole by visualizing two views of network activity. Thicker colored rings represent the network logs for different system layers, from the operating system to the firewall. The overlaid white rings represent anomalous events (most likely to be security threats) that are detected by a custom algorithm.
Rapid Prototyping
A developer had an idea for displaying the real-time processing of security log files, inspired by shield technology in Star Trek. We love sci-fi inspiration! He sketched a few ideas on the whiteboard to explain his idea.
We worked back and forth from white-boarding to code-sketching to peer review to refine the visualization. We experimented with movement to show the pulsing of information through the system, and added descriptive scales and labels to define the data.