As a frequent traveler myself, I can appreciate this situation. A lone traveler is enjoying a quiet evening in their hotel. As they unwind from the day, they peruse the local paper. They are shocked to learn that their attempt at returning home the next day will be dashed by transit strikes. All modes of public transportation will be shutdown causing an ill-timed exit from their current travel stop. There are certainly other ways for the traveler to reach the airport, but the 5x surge pricing for their popular ride sharing application makes it an expensive trip. There is also an expectation that the ride sharing application drivers might face violence from striking transit workers. This all could have been avoided if their company subscribed to a travel alert for pending situations. The advent of situational awareness tools that can monitor travel threats and pair that to traveler itineraries is an evolving field. It is an advance warning to that weary traveler that forewarns them to seek personal safety and adjust their travel plans accordingly. In the case of our weary traveler, an advance warning would allow them to change their travel plans in time to avoid this sticky situation.
Prescient Traveler is one of the aforementioned situational awareness 
services. EMC and Hortonworks are proud that Prescient Traveler has selected Analytics, Infrastructure, and Storage solutions to power the important function of forewarning travelers of upcoming security risks. Hortonworks HDP and EMC’s Isilon Scale Out NAS Solution will provide the Data Lake functionality for Prescient Traveler. As Prescient underwent a cost evaluation, HDP + Isilon presented an 84% reduction in their current Data Lake cost equation. HDP + Isilon represent a $.13 cost per gigabyte as compared to the existing cost of $.80 per gigabyte. Into this new Data Lake, Prescient will be “pouring” 340 discrete data sources on a minute-by-minute basis to track blogs, social media, travel itineraries, news, media reports, and weather. EMC’s Isilon Scale Out NAS will enable Prescient to run their Prescient Traveler platform with Enterprise Grade SLAs utilizing Hadoop for an uptime unachievable with single points of failure. Hortonworks HDP’s native integration with Isilon will enable easy configuration and management of the Hadoop environment.
Indeed, international and domestic travel can be exciting and rewarding, but it also can be dangerous. Protecting your employees is a top priority and having real-time insights in certain regions at particular times could mitigate or all together eliminate serious security risks. Whether you find your employees in the middle of a labor dispute, Category 5 hurricane or a social uprising, having the intelligence to avoid all these situations would prove to protect the lives of your employees while reducing the potential for astronomical liability costs.
Read the Prescient Traveler case study and Prescient Traveler Web Profile to learn more.
