Niara and Cloudera Partner to Provide A High-Performance, Enterprise-Ready Platform for Advanced Behavior Analytics

Leading UEBA provider Resells Cloudera Enterprise, Using Storage and Compute Scale to Detect and Accelerate Response to Attacks That Have Evaded Real-time Systems

PALO ALTO, Calif., September 7, 2016 — Cloudera, the global provider of the fastest, easiest, and most secure data management and analytics platform built on Apache Hadoop and the latest open source technologies, announced today that it has entered into an agreement with Niara to resell Cloudera Enterprise, the leading Hadoop platform for cybersecurity, as part of its behavioral analytics platform for advanced threat detection. Niara, a recognized leader in user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) uses Hadoop to process an unmatched set of data sources in its analytics platform including logs, flows, packets and external threat feeds. This data is processed by over a hundred supervised and unsupervised machine learning models to establish baselines of normal behavior in order to detect small changes in typical IT activity that, when put into context over time, indicate attacks that have gone unnoticed using other, more traditional security solutions.

“Cloudera offers the most mature, enterprise-ready Hadoop stack in its industry for ingesting and analyzing data,” said Sriram Ramachandran, chief executive officer and co-founder, Niara. “To successfully implement machine learning algorithms at scale, you need the right infrastructure in place operating on the most complete data set. We’re power users ourselves of Cloudera, and so this was a very easy decision to make it a foundational part of our behavior analytics platform.”

Niara focuses on detecting attacks that have gotten past other security defenses—so-called “attacks on the inside” that are launched either through compromised users or malicious insiders. Its machine learning analytics operate at each stage of the kill chain, looking for telltale changes in the behavior of users and hosts, alerting on them before damage is done. For example, a user may propagate ransomware by opening the wrong email attachment, a trusted partner may expose sensitive portal access credentials to unauthorized users accidentally, or a sys admin may slowly exfiltrate patient healthcare records to sell on the dark web.

The computational scale of Cloudera Enterprise allows Niara to apply its machine learning models across multiple dimensions of user behavior. Once an attack is detected, Niara uses the power of Cloudera Enterprise to deliver a historically complete forensic record of the affected entities to a security analyst, reducing the time for investigation and response from hours and days to minutes. 

“Cybersecurity continues to be a board room conversation across every enterprise today,” said Tim Stevens, vice president, Business and Corporate Development, Cloudera. “CISOs recognize that in order to detect malicious insider threats, or even negligent employee actions, solutions must be able to analyze data at scale. Machine learning is very compute intensive and the greater the source of data to compare and contrast behavior against, the more effective threat detection can be.”

Niara started its product development with Cloudera and has spent three years tuning and extending the use of key technologies including Cloudera Manager, Spark, Apache HBase, and Yarn. The result is the most mature and stable Hadoop-based UEBA solution. In addition, Niara provides the most flexibility in terms of delivery platforms from self-contained appliances or installation on existing Cloudera clusters on site to AWS and Azure cloud-based deployments.

All versions of the Cloudera certified solution are available now.