jSonar: Pioneering Security Data Lakes for AWS

Ron Bennatan, CTO

The cloud is a household term in any industry vertical today. Its agility, security, robustness, and scalability are what draw the masses to it. Amazon’s AWS is one of the most popular cloud solutions available on the market today and jSonar offers its security data lake using AWS’ services. In a recent interview with Ron Bennatan, CTO of jSonar, he explains how the company simplifies security by enabling clients to realize the benefits of a high-performance security data lake without incurring the costs and delays of designing and implementing it from the ground-up.

What are some of the trends jSonar sees in the AWS space and how do you leverage them?

Most organizations are realizing that they need a data lake to house the output of a variety of security tools to make the information available for reporting and analytics. However, they are also seeing a steady stream of failed “build your own” data lake programs and are now looking for an “out of the box” solution that does not require any development. We started delivering our security data lake in the cloud many years ago. To us, it was evident that it was the right thing to do from a simplicity and cost optimization standpoint. All our customers are large enterprises, so the vast majority of their security tooling and systems live on-premise. It was difficult in the beginning to convince client security teams to migrate their security data to the public cloud, but in the past year, we have seen not just acceptance, but a preference for such deployments—we are exploiting this trend to enable us to grow faster.

In the past year, we have seen not just acceptance, but a preference for cloud deployments of security data lakes

How long have you been associated with AWS and why is it essential to your business?

We have been using AWS for the past four years and employ it more than any other cloud platform. While we also deploy to Azure, GCP, and IBM Cloud, we find that AWS provides the optimal combination of technology, support, and cost for our particular needs. We are also seeing the enterprise adoption of AWS growing; Azure and AWS are the two that we see most often being selected by our customers; making both critical to our business.

What are the challenges faced by organizations in the AWS space and how are you addressing these issues?

While some organizations are taking the leap and moving production workloads to the cloud, many are hesitant—which may be due to lack of experience. We have done this for so long that we help make it easier and safer for them to take the leap. Many applications are delivered using Cloud Services such as SQL on Azure or RDS on AWS, SharePoint Online and Office 365. They require the same level of security and compliance that they have on their on-premise systems. We help out customers by ensuring that whatever security policies the organizations have on-premise they can accomplish for their cloud environments as well. From that perspective, we are enabling and accelerating the movement of workloads into the cloud.

What are the distinct features of jSonar that give you a competitive edge?

Our edge is both in technology and in functionality. On the technical side, we are much more efficient than other offerings based on the unique characteristics of our JSON-native data store. Where systems based on ELK or Hadoop require 50 nodes to build a sizeable lake, we do it with 2-4 nodes and yet offer superior performance. Other systems need many-node clusters to ingest 10TB of data per day; we do it with a single node. Large clusters are complex in terms of operations and drive costs up. Since we are about simplicity and ROI, this gives us an edge. On the functional side, we do not just give our customers building blocks and tools. With us, everything is built-in—you get the ingestion, analytics, UEBA, policy management, data mash-up capabilities and a lot more, out of the box, without the need for developers.