Today, cyber defenders face an unprecedented set of challenges as they work to secure and protect their organizations. In fact, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) Annual Data Breach Report, there were 2,365 cyber attacks in 2023 with more than 300 million victims, and a 72% increase in data breaches since 2021.
The constant barrage of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks has left many professionals feeling overwhelmed and burned out. With the sheer volume and sophistication of these attacks increasing daily, defenders must implement AI and automation to combat intrusions proactively and effectively.
However, there is a fundamental challenge standing in the way of being successful: data. Read on to discover the issues that cyber defenders face leveraging data, analytics, and AI to do their jobs, how Cloudera’s open data lakehouse mitigates those issues, and how this architecture is crucial for successfully navigating the complexities of the modern cybersecurity landscape.
The Problem with Cyber Data
Data is both the greatest asset and the biggest challenge for cyber defenders. The problem isn’t just the volume of the data, but also how difficult it is to manage and make sense of it. Cyber defenders struggle with:
- Too much data: Cybersecurity tools generate an overwhelming volume of log data, including Domain Name Service (DNS) records, firewall logs, and more. All of this data is essential for investigations and threat hunting, but existing systems often struggle to manage it efficiently. Ingesting the data is often too slow and/or expensive, leading to latent responses and missed opportunities.
- Too many tools: An average enterprise organization deploys more than 40 different tools for cyber defense. Each tool serves a unique purpose, but analysts are often left juggling multiple interfaces, leading to fragmented investigations. The manual process of switching between tools slows down their work, often leaving them reliant on rudimentary methods of keeping track of their findings.
- Unstructured data not ready for analysis: Even when defenders finally collect log data, it’s rarely in a format that’s ready for analysis. Cyber logs are often unstructured or semi-structured, making it difficult to derive insights from them. The result is that analysts waste valuable time and resources normalizing, parsing, and preparing data for investigation.
A Better Way Forward: Cloudera’s Open Data Lakehouse
Cloudera offers a solution to these challenges with its open data lakehouse, which combines the flexibility and scalability of data lake storage with data warehouse functionality to unify and simplify the management of cyber log data. By breaking down data silos and integrating log data from multiple sources, Cloudera empowers defenders with the real-time analytics to respond to threats swiftly.
Here’s how Cloudera makes it possible:
- One unified system: Cloudera’s open data lakehouse consolidates all critical log data into one system. By leveraging Apache Iceberg, an open table format designed for high-performance analytics on massive volumes of data, cyber defenders can access all of their data and conduct investigations with greater speed and efficiency. Whether they need to query data from today or from years past, the system scales up or down to meet their needs.
- Optimized for analytics: Iceberg tables are designed to deliver analytics faster and more effectively. With flexible schema and partitioning, Iceberg tables can scale to handle petabytes of data while compressing logs to save on storage costs. The metadata-driven approach ensures quick query planning so defenders don’t have to deal with slow processes when they need fast answers.
- Secure and governed data: With Cloudera Shared Data Experience (SDX), security and governance are built into every step. Cyber logs often contain sensitive data about users, networks, and investigations, so it’s critical to protect this information while ensuring that authorized teams can access and share it safely.
- Streaming pipelines for real-time insights: While the open data lakehouse provides a foundation for analytics, it is Cloudera’s data pipeline capabilities that transform raw, unstructured cyber logs into optimized Iceberg tables. Using Cloudera Data Flow and Cloudera Stream Processing, teams can filter, parse, normalize, and enrich log data in real time, ensuring that defenders are always working with clean, structured data that’s ready for advanced analytics.
- Seamless integration: Cloudera’s open data lakehouse integrates with a wide range of tools, enabling investigators, threat hunters, and data scientists to work with their preferred tools. From drag-and-drop interfaces in Cloudera Data Visualization to advanced machine learning models for anomaly detection, the possibilities are endless. Plus, with Iceberg’s combination of interoperability and open standards, customers can choose the best tool for each job.
Real-Time Threat Detection with Iceberg
Cyber log data is massive and constantly evolving. In many traditional systems, query planning can take as long as executing the query itself. Iceberg makes query planning more efficient by storing all of the table metadata–including partitioning and file locations–in a way that’s easy for query engines to consume. It ensures that even large, constantly evolving tables remain manageable, enabling cyber defenders to perform real-time threat detection without being bogged down by inefficient query planning processes, and leading to faster, more efficient threat detection and investigation workflows.
Additionally, as threats evolve, so too must the systems and processes used to detect and respond to them. Iceberg enables teams to modify schemas, partitioning, and enrichment processes on the fly without having to rewrite tables. Versioning with Iceberg snapshots makes it easy to reproduce a previous state of the table so cyber defenders always have access to historical context without managing and maintaining multiple copies of the data.
The Future: AI-Powered Cyber Defense
Cloudera also prepares cyber defenders for the future of AI-driven cybersecurity. With built-in generative AI tools like the SQL AI Assistant, analysts can quickly write SQL queries to extract the needed answers. From automating routine tasks to building chatbots for incident summaries, Cloudera’s AI capabilities make cyber defense more efficient, while keeping data secure and under control.
Conclusion: Empower Your Defenders, Protect Your Business
By uniting cyber data in a scalable, secure, and analytics-ready environment, Cloudera’s open data lakehouse empowers defenders to stay one step ahead of cyber threats. With seamless integration with many tools and execution engines, flexible and cost-effective storage, and built-in AI capabilities, Cloudera empowers defenders to protect their organizations with real-time and predictive insights that help them keep pace with cyber threats.
Learn more about this solution, and all of the other innovations from Cloudera, by watching the on-demand recording of Cloudera NOW.
