On the Road with SenSage

As part of TMCnet.com's special On the Road series in San Jose, CA, TMC CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) had a chance to sit down with Joe Gottlieb, President and CEO of SenSage, a company who helps organizations collect, store, analyze and interpret complex information to identify new threats and improve cyber-security defenses.

SenSage enables industry leaders to access and analyze their structured and unstructured data for real-time event management and deep forensic, historical analysis and large-scale investigations to detect security events and Advanced Persistent Threats.

Events, as Gottlieb describes, are primarily log data, which helps businesses monitor what is going on. However, the process can be overwhelming to look at every single event, figuring out what is noise and what can be a threat.

“We are the only company that focuses on event management as a data management problem,” said Gottlieb. “We have a very unique technology to scale event consumption, filtering analysis, and reporting in a very flexible way.”

SenSage delivers a solution with flexible event data collection functionality, a clustered, columnar-based event data warehouse and a unique approach to analytics and intelligence. Their solution has the ability to store all event data in its native form, rather than metadata, an aggregation, or a normalized form, maintaining the integrity of the data for future use.

IPv6 is a security-enabled protocol, one that is a timely topic for SenSage. Migration from IPv4 can create new risks and weaken an organization's security strategy.

“IPv6 has an effect on everyone’s business,” said Gottlieb. “For us, it’s simply being able to understand the different events that are produced with IPv6 addresses. For example, now you need to handle IPv4 addresses, IPv6 addresses, you reconcile where appropriate, isolate those different complications and that’s part of your data analysis model.”

With all of the security news as of late, SenSage and their solutions couldn’t be more timely. Particularly of note are the LulzSec and Anonymous hacks, of which The FBI has arrested members for their role in the attack against the computer systems at Sony Pictures Entertainment. Then there’s the News Corp (News - Alert). illegal phone hacking scandal in England.

“In this case, it’s all about going after information that’s sitting in voicemail,” said Gottlieb. “The normal security precaution would apply, even to consumers, to try and change their passwords, just like you hear from a Sony PlayStation network type breach. The bigger issue is the legislative efforts, which are starting to mandate the retention of IP addresses and other sorts of digital information.”

It is these efforts, notes Gottlieb, that allow SenSage to address this “fifth domain” in which cyber crimes happen.