Sign up for the Sept. 23 Online Chat with Pam Dyson, CIO of the Securities and Exchange Commission

The Securities and Exchange Commission is ready to expand its enterprise data warehouse.

Launched in 2014, the enterprise data warehouse is letting SEC divisions use analytics to better understand their data and make informed decisions.

Pam Dyson, the SEC’s chief information officer, said the EDW platform analyzes semi-structured and unstructured data and integrates mission critical data so multiple divisions can search, visualize and use the information.

Dyson said EDW is one of the key centerpieces to its IT modernization strategy.

“Our strategy is one to either build or employ systems that will allow us to ingest this data, run analytics in this data, model this data and then store the results securely at the SEC,” she said. “That is a general mission across the SEC, and again, we are doing lots of things in that space to ensure we can ingest the volume of data that we need to ingest to run analytics on. Some of that will be through our EDW technologies, other will be through our other shared platforms and then thirdly we will leverage the cloud as a part of that strategy.”

Dyson said she plans to release the data strategy sometime in the next six months as part of the commission’s digital transformation iteration of its work smarter strategy.

And the need for an ever-evolving data strategy continues to grow. The SEC had more than one petabyte of data in the warehouse, and demand continues to increase.

“We absolutely are looking for new types of tools,” Dyson said. “A lot of the tools we use are vendor specific and we buy them from the same vendors many agencies use in terms of managing big data. There’s lots of opportunities for vendors to come in to demonstrate the capabilities of their tools, to work with our subject matter experts, our data architects, our data management professionals so we can realize the benefits of using some of these tools.”

Dyson said the SEC already has an enterprise data analytics platform and is deploying a new business intelligence tool.

Along with tools, Dyson said the SEC is using the cloud to make access and storage of data better.

She said the SEC already consolidated data centers and moved certain websites to the cloud, and now is modernizing its EDGAR system under the multi-year effort called Work Smarter — an IT transformation plan kicked off in 2012.

EDGAR, the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system, is the SEC’s data collection system for companies to submit data. EDGAR also validates indexes, accepts and forwards those submissions to the correct office in the agency.

Dyson said the SEC is gathering current and future requirements, especially in light of new rulemaking that is possible over the next few years.

“We’re underway in terms of all the technical requirements to build the architecture that we will use going forward to modernize that system,” she said. “We believe in fiscal year 2017 we will start the actual construction of the new, modernized EDGAR system.”

Dyson said the SEC is working on an acquisition strategy and could be another year before they put out any specific procurement documents.

The update to EDGAR is part of how the SEC is moving spending out of legacy and in to the modernization of mission-critical systems.

“We continue to invest in spend-and-save efforts such as building more enterprise efforts. So where, for example, we’ve had document management systems that were custom built for individual divisions, we’re building enterprise solutions we can leverage across the organizations,” she said. “We can increase analytics in those spaces because we can share data repositories. We can search huge volumes of data across those enterprise platforms so we are realizing a lot of benefits from those areas.”

Dyson said the SEC is moving internal, or support systems in the cloud as part of this modernization effort.

She said the SEC’s incident support system will run in the cloud, and possibly putting data analytics tools in the cloud too.

“We also are looking at high processing computer capability so we can scale up as needed,” she said. “One of the difficulties with our data centers, even though they are virtualized and we realized the benefits of having a smaller footprint from a power consumption per se, they are not necessarily scalable as a cloud solution right now. So one of the things that we are looking to do to augment our local cloud is to build this scalability in the cloud using the infrastructure to compute and store in the cloud. We have lots of demand from lots of groups for high processing compute so that we can crunch numbers, so we can crunch data in short time frames to help with some of our examine and investigation material. So we are looking for seamless way to augment the infrastructure in doing that.”

All of these efforts to move to the cloud are also paving the way for the SEC to better support a mobile environment.

Dyson said a significant of SEC employees work outside the office so she is implementing an enterprise mobile device management (MDM) platform.

“That platform will allow us to secure those devices and to help manage those devices,” she said. “We are able to wipe the devices. We are able to change the security on devices. We also will be able to leverage some of our persistent threat tools using this system so we can make sure no one has breached the SEC domain through the use of these tools.”

She said the MDM also will give the agency more flexibility in the number and types of devices they are using — meaning smartphones, tablets and laptops from a host of manufacturers.

“We’ve had a large group of people testing this for some time. We are very close. We are just locking down some of the security settings on it. It is our expectation we will roll this out to the enterprise in the next two-to-three months,” she said. “This mobile device management system will also allow us to manage mobile applications and the security around those applications as well.”

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