For this week’s 5-Minute Interview, I caught up with John Mark Suhy, the CTO of PureThink – the exclusive provider of Neo4j Government Edition to U.S. federal, state, Department of Defense and intelligence agencies.Q: Can you talk to me about how you guys use Neo4j?
John Mark Suhy: We’re trying to unify different agencies that are focused on money laundering. One of the problems we’ve seen is that investigating active money laundering inside a country usually is easy for them because you have all the data and your different financial institutions report to you.
But when people start bouncing money outside of these countries, and they try to basically layer it in different ways that takes advantage of the fact that data is not usually being shared, that’s where things can fall through the holes.
We’re trying to figure out a way to centralize and actually provide a way for these different countries to provide data that can be put into a master graph that we can use to identify how money is flowing through to a specific system from one account to another, if it’s being pushed into a neighborhood, if it’s being converted to cash and then you start seeing a huge amount of deposits that aren’t normal for that neighborhood. That can happen in third world countries, for example.
The big thing is being able to share across borders. One other issue that you’ve got to deal with is that these governments don’t want to share the actual data so you’ve got to be able to abstract it but still relate it. Something that we’re looking at using Neo4j for is actually the main piece of this new proposed system.
Q: Can you talk to me about why you guys chose Neo4j? What made it stand out?
John Mark: We’ve been looking at a bunch of different technologies, obviously RDBMS. We came across Neo4j a couple years ago, and we were impressed with the speed and what you could do with it, especially for the type of data and the type of queries that we’re running.
It’s amazing how fast it is compared to using a relational database. Everyone knows that. When we were looking for a graph database, Neo4j was the one that stuck out. It’s got the biggest backing, it’s got a huge community, and long term we know it’s going to be there so that’s an extra bonus.
Q: What have been some of your most surprising results when using Neo4j?
John Mark: In one of our past projects, we were doing some data processing, trying to find some specific fraud patterns, and we would go put it into Hadoop, then we’d have about maybe an hour or two before we’d get back results and make use of that data. Even then, only a human analyst would ultimately be able to see and understand what was going on.
Well, in that hour-long window, a fraudulent event could have already happened, making our initial Hadoop solution only good for looking at past scenarios.
Not even as part of this original project, we actually decided just to test the same data in Neo4j Community Edition, sort of as an experiment. I don’t remember what version of Neo4j it had been, but we were able to replicate the same pattern-matching behavior.
The results came back instantly, we were so amazed. We thought we had made a mistake or something was wrong, figuring that because we’d done it quickly that we might have missed something. It happened to be that what we were looking for was best done by a graph database.
Looking back, I can’t believe we didn’t think about that before. If we had kept going in the other direction, we wouldn’t have been able to achieve this kind of real-time situational awareness.
That’s a key in government. A lot of stuff is situational awareness in real time – you need to be able to make decisions quickly. I see Neo4j growing in the government sector especially around real-time results, around logistics, around cybersecurity and ultimately anything that requires situational awareness and really complex connected data.
Q: If you could go back in time taking all of your Neo4j knowledge, what would you do differently the second time around?
John Mark: What I would have done differently is I probably would have gone to advanced training right off the bat, before even trying to involve it in the project and just learning along the way. That’s something I would recommend for anybody.
There’s so many resources up on the Neo4j website, you can pick all the courses, go onto the user groups, etc. If I would have done that beforehand, I think we would have cut off six months or a year. We would have been able to use it in different projects to solve problems that we ended up spending a lot more time using other techniques and solutions.
Q: Anything else that you want to add or say?
John Mark: We work with Neo4j on the Government Edition which addresses FISMA. The Government Edition has a framework that adds functionality to Neo4j Enterprise Edition to support NIST 800-53 security controls. I know that with the upcoming Neo4j 3.0 release, there are a lot of features that are going to make our lives easier in for government work.
We actually look forward to that. You’re going to see government adoption increase as people understand what a graph database is. It’s going to be in niche areas to start, but it’s going to be exciting to see it grow.
Want to share about your Neo4j project in a future 5-Minute Interview? Drop us a line at content@neotechnology.com
Curious how your government agency can use Neo4j? Download this white paper, The Top 5 Use Cases of Graph Databases, and discover how to tap into the power of connected data at your federal agency.
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