In this issue of the President's Letter, Frederica explores Dark Analytics: A Deeper Path to Unearthing Raw Internet Data to Trace Your Insights and Behavioral Patterns on the Deep Web. Judy President, JB Homer Associates

There is a lot of controversy about raw data being explored on your information. In fact, a new law was passed on April 3, 2017 in Congress which reversed privacy issues to undo the privacy protection of web browsing so that marketers could have access to your behavioral patterns. This translates into big business as the deep web has a vast amount of raw data, which has not yet been analyzed and is ripe for picking.

For the first time, technology is paving the way for CIOs, business leaders, and data scientists to look at that data and to unearth valuable Business Intelligence on customer and operational insights. This is wide open territory across enterprises as ever-expanding storage of data remains unstructured and unanalyzed. Image, Audio, and Video files generated by the IoT (Internet of Things), and enormous troves of raw data remain in the recesses of the deep web. Computer vision, pattern recognition, and cognitive analytics will make it possible for companies to view these unexploited sources and derive insights that lead to better experiences and decisions across all businesses.

Today, Data is being viewed as a "competitive currency". It is buried everywhere, and it is "in the raw" within volumes of transactions through social media, search engines, and innumerable technologies, critical to the customer. This ultimately sheds light on insights and predictive analytics for future businesses modus operandi.

Businesses are now capable of harnessing distributed data architecture, machine learning, visualization, natural language processing, and cognitive analytics to derive answers and to identify valuable patterns and insights, unattainable a few years ago.

Now comes the new challenge, leveraging these tools and skill-sets to uncover dark analytics. This is yet to be unearthed at the depths of the IoT, as it is buried in unstructured data, located in text messages, documents, e-mail, video and audio files, and still images.

Untapped data is already in your organization's possession in large amounts from employee's home addresses to workplace performance ratings, to data retention. Traditional data found in our smart phones, tablets, and laptops remain as valuable information on customer behavior.

Data in the deep web, as a dimension of dark analytics, contains hidden information. This is curated by academics, government agencies, and other third party domains. The intelligence community monitors the volume and context of the deep web in order to identify potential threats. Businesses may soon be able to curate competitive intelligence by using a variety of emerging search tools.

Deep web technologies provide search tools for retrieving and analyzing data that would be inaccessible to standard search engines. The deep data and analytics capabilities will provide businesses with the opportunities to understand what they could do differently.

What are your thoughts on the dark web as it uncovers, retrieves, and analyzes your information and behavioral patterns?