Governments and military flirting with SAP's HANA for security operations

Government and military agencies across the world are being won over by SAP HANA's inherent security and mobility benefits, according to co-CEO, Bill McDermott.
At Sapphire in Orlando on Wednesday, McDermott said that the interconnected nature of the world has led many public sector institutions to take an interest in the potential security benefits of big data analytics tools like HANA.
"On security, we're in some very interesting conversations now, not only in the public market, but in the defence, logistics and military markets all over the world. There's a tremendous amount of interest in SAP for its secure nature as a platform," he said.
The co-chief said that the interest is the latest stage of HANA's development, showing how it can be used for more advanced purposes by businesses. "It's about trying to talk about HANA in a business benefit conversation. We're no longer talking about the ability to read 520 billion records in 400 milliseconds, we're translating that speed to business value," said McDermott.
"It's an infrastructure conversation where you ask, 'How do you build a scalable, secure way of connecting enterprise quality systems featuring enterprise quality mobility in a way that doesn't create chaos?'. It took a lot of for us to convince customers that this is the real problem to solve."
McDermott highlighted HANA's predictive powers as a key feature that could be developed for security purposes. "Being able to do transactions is one thing, track the sentiment of the crowd is another thing, but being able to predict somebody's intentions is an entirely new thing. Today's enterprise on a disk can't do that," he said.
The SAP chief highlighted one recent application of the feature by a small airport security firm as a prime example of the feature's potential security applications. "I was talking to one innovator last night, a small venture-backed company who standardised his small business model on HANA. His business is essentially working to keep the largest airports in the world safe," said McDermott.
"To give you an example one application of HANA here: if the guy's a baggage handler and he doesn't swipe out at the end of his shift and he's swiped out at the end of his shift within five minutes of it ending for the last five years, that pattern is going to come out as an alert message to the manager. The manager's then going to say, ‘What's up with the baggage guy?'. They'll then go and find him and ask him some good questions. That's a whole new application and business model that's only made possible because of HANA."
McDermott's comments come during a wider security push by SAP. Prior to this, the firm unveiled its new Mobile secure technology. The feature is designed to make consumer Android and iOS devices secure enough for enterprise use.