Last week saw the connected universe return to the analytics world’s agenda after Teradata Corp. formed a new business unit dedicated to helping organizations take better advantage of their sensory data. The group will focus on complex use cases like predicting industrial equipment failures that the average enterprise can’t implement on its own, or at least not in any reasonable time frame.

Teradata plans to offer the group’s services alongside its data warehousing software to try and become more competitive against the numerous rivaling providers that have cropped up in recent years. One of the fastest-growing of the bunch is MemSQL Inc., a San Francisco startup backed by Ashton Kutcher that last week raised another $36 million in funding from a group of institutional investors. The capital will be used to develop new features for its namesake database, which combines a speedy in-memory processing engine with a columnar store geared towards historical analytics.

The tight integration between the two components enables records to be move back and forth without the tedious data conversion that have to be performed in more conventional setups. As a result, MemSQL is able to quickly ingest sensory transmissions from the connected universe and make them available for an organization’s analysts while they’re still fresh. The resulting improvement in response times can go a long way for a utility company trying to monitor its power grid for issues, or a healthcare provider tasked with keeping watch on high-risk patients.

Yet as beneficial as they are, the sensors and other fast-multiplying connected devices on the corporate network also present new security risks that make it harder for organizations to protect their infrastructure. To ease the challenge, Illumio Inc. last week launched a program under which a company can have its systems scanned for unpatched vulnerabilities and other threats at no charge. The startup hopes that the move will promote adoption of its Adaptive Security Platform, which provides capabilities for preventing malicious traffic from reaching the target application.

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