Versive and Cloudera Partner to Provide AI-Powered Cybersecurity

Earlier this month, Versive announced their latest strategic partnership with Cloudera in order to address the cybersecurity gap in advanced persistent threat (APTs). Versive is an up-and-coming provider of cybersecurity machine learning solutions with a focus towards automated threat detection and incident response among other quickly rising concerns (e.g., regulatory compliance and insider threat detection). Cloudera is an established leader of Big Data solutions and the ‘mastermind’ behind technologies such as Apache Hive, MapReduce, Pandas, Impyla and many others.

This announcement arrives at a time when vendors are gearing up for an uncertain future against the rising tide of security challenges. Machine learning is one of the most recent (and notable) additions to the cybersecurity arsenal and a host of startups (and even established companies) are literally hijacking the terms “Artificial Intelligence” and “Machine Learning” to carry them forward. As ABI Research has predicted in past reports, there are many vendors (particularly new market entrants) whose products are nothing more than glorified dashboard analytics solutions with minimal features for elaborate data gathering and processing capabilities.

For most studied vendors and with the appropriate material in hand, it usually takes less than an hour to determine if their solution equates to a college-level machine learning dissertation or an actual interoperable, robust solution. Although no case studies or pilots have been made available yet, it seems that the Versive and Cloudera partnership is actually on the right path and depicts all the signs for such a robust solution and a much promising entrant in the machine learning cybersecurity market.

Versive took its time honing its solution by first integrating with flexible and open source Apache Spark. Apache Spark is one of the titans in Big Data architecture and a direct competitor to Hadoop – especially when it comes to the major selling point of computing run-time. This has allowed Versive to enhance its solutions with far better integration and scalability features (two of the key concerns in Big Data) and reinvent its offerings with a greater focus towards a wider spectrum of cybersecurity challenges. That said, after incorporating Apache Spark, a partnership with Cloudera is not only a natural stepping stone but also a quite effective one.

This is because a large portion of machine learning vendors advertise their solutions as “interoperable” and “fits-all-sizes” but, unfortunately, they really don’t. It is also more likely to spot the challenges with the client-side algorithm training in some vendors or the questionable analysis from open-source databases and proprietary web-crawlers from others. At the very least it seems that Versive, Apache Spark, and Cloudera have forged a direct link between Big Data technologies, machine leaning, and cybersecurity.  At this point in time all the pieces for a promising endeavor are already in place.

Of course, when it comes to machine learning addressing only one part of the equation usually results in failure. There is a great number of AI, Deep Learning, user entity and behavioral analytics (UEBA), and automation solutions presently being ‘brewed’ but IBM’s Watson is currently leading the way as an incubating, ‘true’ AI tasked with addressing future cybersecurity challenges. For more information see ABI Research’s report Machine Learning in Cybersecurity Technologies’.