Data Recovery Digest

Ransomware is a growing threat that could affect any organization at any time. While next-gen technology has given us the ability to respond quicker and more efficiently than ever before, it’s still not enough. Given the widespread nature of ransomware attacks in the 21st century, it’s obvious that organizational network security needs to be stepped up to the max.

As such, Securonix has recently partnered with Ahana Cloud to provide security information and event management (SIEM) services on a large scale. The hybrid cloud services provider hopes to achieve this via Ahana’s proprietary software, Presto; a distributed query engine.

What Is Presto?

On its most fundamental level, Presto is an SQL query engine that provides extremely fast and efficient processing of big data. It’s capable of leveraging data from many different sources, including Amazon Web Services S3, MySQL, Hadoop, MongoDB, and many others. Moreover, Presto is even capable of gathering data from multiple sources via a single query.

Sachin Nayyar, chief executive officer of Securonix, spoke about this functionality in a recent interview by saying: “Securonix on the cloud brings together all the data, then runs purpose-built analytics on it. We are today pulling in several million events per second from our customers, and we provide just a very small handful of events and reduce the false positives so that people can focus on them.”

Making Presto even more attractive to IT administrators is the fact that it’s remained an open-source platform since 2015. Although it was originally built by the development team at Facebook, it was taken over by the Presto Foundation and currently exists as a project for the Linux Foundation.

Steven Mih, co-founder and CEO with Ahana, described Presto’s original purpose by saying: “It was built to replace the complicated Hadoop stack in order to then drive analytics at very lightning-fast queries on large, large sets of data. And so Presto fits in with this open data lake analytics movement, which has made Presto one of the fastest-growing projects out there.”

Bolstering Big Data Queries

A major part of Securonix’s plan involves improving big data search queries and capabilities for the future. Not only will this also help them strengthen their overall cybersecurity services, but it will also cement their reputation as an innovator and leader in the industry.

Nayyar continued his statement by saying: “With something like this, very soon, we will be able to offer our customers 12 months of data searchable at extremely fast speeds at very reasonable price points, and you will own your own data. We know there is a community behind it, and it will be kind of available for us to use and we will be able to contribute in it for the long term.”

He also went into detail about how his company settled on Ahana, saying: “Then when we start looking at Presto, we came across Ahana. For every open-source system, you definitely need a sort of a for-profit company that invests in the community and then that takes the community forward, because without a company like this, the community will die.”