The Wall Street Journal-20080128-Technology -A Special Report-- Business Solutions- Finding the Gems- Protecting the Jewels

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Technology (A Special Report); Business Solutions: Finding the Gems, Protecting the Jewels

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These days, companies are constantly dealing with the problem of having too much.

Computer systems are churning out so much information about customers, the marketplace and the company's own operations that vital intelligence frequently goes undetected. At the same time, businesses have so much traffic coming into their computer networks -- emails, instant messages, Web pages -- that malicious software in the form of viruses or spyware can slip past the usual defenses.

In this report, we examine some ways businesses are tackling these challenges. To address the too-much-information problem, there's a new breed of software that sifts through customer communications to find valuable patterns. Unlike other business-intelligence tools, text analytics can scour documents that use "natural" language, such as customer surveys, calls to the help desk or blog postings and emails, unlocking knowledge that would be too costly to search out manually.

A second article looks at how companies are improving how they deal with possibly malicious software. An increasingly popular line of defense, called an intrusion-prevention system, can examine the contents of incoming traffic to make sure that, say, a downloaded Web page doesn't contain a harmful "Trojan horse" program.

So, as overabundance causes trouble, here are ways to make it more manageable.