Realm.Security emerged from stealth this week to launch a platform for collecting and normalizing cybersecurity telemetry data in a way that promises to streamline analytics and reduce costs.

Fresh off raising $5 million in funding, Realm.Security CEO Peter Martin said organizations that can aggregate cybersecurity data will also find they are less dependent on any one cybersecurity tool or platform provider.

Most cybersecurity teams today depend on multiple tools and platforms that each generate log data that needs to be normalized and analyzed. Realm.Security streamlines the collection of that telemetry data to reduce the total cost via a licensing model based on actual usage of that data, said Martin.
Centralizing the management of cybersecurity log data also reduces the time and effort required to pinpoint the root cause of a potential cybersecurity breach, he added.

Ultimately, most organizations will soon be creating a security fabric through which they manage the massive amounts of data that cybersecurity teams collect, said Martin. In theory, cybersecurity teams could use existing data management tools to manage all that data but the Realm.Security platform is designed to specifically recognize the types of data sources that cybersecurity tools and platforms generate, he added.

Cybersecurity teams are growing increasingly sensitive to the total cost of cybersecurity in an era where the number of tools and platforms being employed has dramatically increased. Cybersecurity teams could theoretically consolidate those tools and platforms. However, different members of a cybersecurity team might still prefer a tool or platform they are not necessarily willing to give up in the name of consolidation. Realm.Security is betting that a data management platform will alternatively reduce storage costs, which only continue to increase as multiple tools and platforms continue to generate massive amounts of log data.

Of course, cybersecurity teams don’t necessarily need to store all that data forever. The challenge is that no one knows when a breach might have first occurred without being able to analyze log data. Realm.Security addresses that issue by making it simpler to move older telemetry data to cold storage and then rehydrate that data whenever needed for analysis or a compliance audit, said Martin.

It’s not clear to what degree cybersecurity teams are assigning specific individuals to manage the data being collected. However, as more of them begin to evaluate various artificial intelligence (AI) tools and platforms the need to streamline the management of all that data is becoming more apparent. AI tools, after all, are only as good as the quality of the data that was used to train them, noted Martin.

One way or another, cybersecurity teams will need to find ways to more proactively manage log data before storing it in, for example, a security information event management (SIEM) platform, a data lake or simply dumping it all in a cloud storage service. After all, there is no such thing as free data storage. The more telemetry data is aggregated and normalized the less costly cybersecurity becomes at a time when the amount of data being collected is rapidly becoming overwhelming.