Niara, Cloudera Partner on Big Data Security

As big data gets, well, bigger, security to protect these new systems also will have to rise to the occasion. To that end, fledgling security companies Niara and Cloudera have struck up a partnership, pairing their solutions to combine advanced real-time threat discovery with enterprise big data management.

Cloudera Enterprise offers big data management built on Apache Hadoop, the leading open source platform for big data solutions. Under the terms of the partnership, Niara’s Security Intelligence Platform has been tested and validated to work with Cloudera Enterprise, with Niara’s solution now included in the Cloudera Certified Technology Program, according to Niara.

“Cloudera Enterprise is the ideal platform on which to build a solution that provides big data security analytics,” said Sriram Ramachandran, CEO of Niara, in a press release. “By aggregating and managing the massive depth and breadth of security data required to drive sophisticated behavioral analytics, Niara not only unearths these attacks but accelerates the investigation and response as well.”

Specifically, Niara Security Intelligence integrates advanced machine learning and user behavior analytics with forensics to automate the discovery of sophisticated, multistage cyberattacks, according to Niara.

Niara’s solution—offered both on premise and in the cloud—combines security data from different sources to provide visibility into potentially suspicious activity, reducing the time and skill needed for security analysts to discover compromised users or malicious insider activity, perform advanced threat hunting and conduct incident investigations, the company said.

This type of rapid discovery of threats is what enterprises are looking for to lock down big data solutions and prevent breaches that expose critical data, said Tim Stevens, vice president of Business and Corporate Development at Cloudera, in the release.

“Niara’s ability to leverage the scale and flexibility of Cloudera Enterprise and use varied data sources, not just log data, in both analytics and forensics increases SOC (security operations center) and analyst efficiency by enabling them to focus on the right problems and act more quickly,” he said.

Indeed, big data, like the cloud, has unique security needs that can’t be addressed by typical security solutions, according to a recent survey by SANS Institute sponsored by Cloudera. Security specialists focusing on these systems are trying to address these needs with more targeted solutions that can better address threats in real time.

One of those solutions is advanced behavioral analytics, a key feature of Niara’s offering, according to the company. This includes user behavioral analytics (UBA), which can detect even subtle changes in user, system or application activity that can be aggregated and tracked to discover threats.

Niara Security Intelligence also includes accelerated incident investigation and response, which develops security profiles for key IT elements on a network, including users, systems and IP addresses. Called Entity360 profiles, they deliver the supporting activity summaries over time so companies can understand both the severity of a threat and how to respond, the company said.

Another feature of Niara’s solution is automated and human-driven threat hunting that matches new threat signals from external sources with historical data to analyze threat history to come up with consistent responses to repeated security issues, according to Niara.