Innovator Spotlight: DataBee™

The challenge of locating and utilizing data within organizations has become increasingly problematic. Despite the abundance of data available, much of it remains scattered, siloed, and unstructured, making it difficult for employees to access and leverage effectively. This fragmented data landscape forces teams to spend excessive amounts of time searching for the right information, leading to delays in decision-making and a significant drain on productivity.

Without a streamlined approach to data integration and management, businesses struggle to extract meaningful insights, leaving critical security and compliance gaps unaddressed. The lack of clean, complete, and correlated data not only hampers operational efficiency but also exposes organizations to unnecessary risks.

When 68% of available data goes unused, it’s not surprising that employees lose 12 hours of productivity per week chasing data (Forrester Research, 2022). DataBee™ is addressing the widespread and daunting security data problem faced by most organizations today: the lack of clean, complete and correlated security and business data that provides the insights needed to find and fix security and compliance gaps quickly and cost-effectively.

DataBee™ from Comcast Technology Solutions brings to market an enterprise-ready security data fabric that delivers connected compliance and security data that works for everyone. Cybersecurity, risk, and compliance teams can use data as the shared language because insights are rich with business-relevant context they understand for better and smarter decisions.

The data transformation and content engine weaves together your security, IT, and non-traditional data sources and feeds into analysis-ready datasets and content that can be applied for whatever your use cases may be.

“[It] helps customers manage costs and drive efficiencies. It keeps evolving so that organizations can continue the ‘shift left’ to the very origins of their data. The goal is that quality data woven together, enriched, and delivered by DataBee™ will ultimately fuel AI systems and help business and technology leaders across the spectrum glean the insights they need for security, compliance, and long-term viability,” Nicole Bucala, Vice President and General Manager, DataBee™.

Data engineering and management teams can automate data engineering and management with effortless data onboarding, parsing of security data, and normalization to the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF). Wherever your log data is – in cloud storage, coming from SaaS applications, or residing on-premises – DataBee™ addresses all these needs. DataBee™ ingests data from multiple disparate data sources, then aggregates, compresses, standardizes, enriches, correlates, and normalizes into OCSF.

Some of the challenges in managing data which DataBee™ addresses include the following:

1. Employees lose 12 hours a week chasing data (Forrester Research, 2022).
2. 68% of available data in the enterprise goes unused, yet the IBM Cost of a Data Breach 2024 report states that 1 in 3 data breaches involve shadow data.
3. Most organizations average between 50-75 security or related tools in their technology stack while enterprises (Comcast included) easily average 120+ tools.
4. The Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report 2024 states that 14% of breaches involve exploitation of vulnerabilities as an initial access step.
5. Ponemon Institute and Globalscape conducted “The True Cost of Compliance with Data Protection Regulations” that finds the cost of non-compliance was 2.71 times higher than the cost of compliance (2017).

The DataBee™ Hive is built with the foundations of a data fabric and designed with real security, risk, and compliance practitioners’ use and needs in mind.

“Cybersecurity is increasingly an intelligence challenge, driving the need to connect enterprise-wide data, and build insights to solve security and compliance gaps. Innovation and thought leadership on data fabrics is much needed in the security industry to help companies unlock security data and build next level solutions to protect against cyber threats.” CISO, National Transportation Services Provider and DataBee™ customer.

As data streams, DataBee™ applies patent-pending entity resolution to create a unique identifier not only for device identifiers like IP addresses, MAC addresses, FQDNs, and hostnames, but also for user entities, consolidating various identifiers into a unified profile across multiple sources. Data is flattened by DataBee™, and after it is processed it is compressed for performance and long-term storage in a data lake of the organization’s choice.

DataBee™ brings together and enriches security and other enterprise data for a complete picture to allow for effective and actionable security and compliance insights. Teams can visualize data in the DataBee™ UI or in business intelligence tools, the data lake, and other security tools they already know and love to use, while allowing an organization to retain ownership of its data.

“The team at Comcast working on DataBee™ have been amazing partners and rapidly responding to any of our requests. I could not ask for a better partner invested in our success.”  VP & CISO, Infrastructure & Operations, National Insurance Company and DataBee™ customer.

On top of the DataBee™ Hive platform, customers can purchase solutions that address specific challenges that they might be wrestling with above and beyond security data silos. These additional product modules include:

• DataBee™ for Security Hygiene delivers contextual, 360-degree view and understanding of internal and external cyber hygiene and assets for visibility into controls coverage and gaps.
  • Newly released BeeKeeper AI™ (available for Security Threats entitlement as well) is a gen AI chat bot to find and validate asset owners using enterprise chat clients.
• DataBee™ for Security Threats applies and manages threat detection and hunting in real-time data streams.
  • Newly released automated detection chaining links related alerts together from DataBee and other security tools to uncover sophisticated and low and slow attacks.
• DataBee™ for Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM) provides consistent and accurate compliance dashboards and reports that measure risks and control effectiveness.
• DataBee™ for PCI-DSS 4.0 Preparedness provides pre-built dashboards to monitor and close compliance gaps related to PCI-DSS.

Incident responders and threat hunters can expand individual or multiple DataBee™ findings to dive deeper into the alert details.

DataBee™ EntityViews™ aggregates related alerts into chronological timelines.

This screenshot shows the Azure AD ingestion flow that is being processed by DataBee™. It indicates the ownership of the data source, the data flow, the data quality score, and ingestion information.

Data is key to evidence and to making the right decisions. Without having all the right data at your fingertips, security and risk management practices can quickly develop operational gaps. For example, in many organizations that do not do continuous control monitoring, compliance level attainment is cyclical; namely, as an audit date approaches, the level of compliance increases, but then it drops off again until the next audit.

Why? Because testing and reporting on IT controls is a manual, laborious process. This is compliance drift, which drags down security posture. As another example, without having the right data retained for security investigations, finding the attacker and what they took may never happen. SIEMs have limited retention and don’t necessarily process and retain all the insights one might need to pinpoint the source or path of an attack.

DataBee™ is designed with real security, risk, and compliance practitioners’ data use and needs in mind. Ultimately, data is key to evidence and to making the right decisions. With an enterprise-ready security data fabric platform, your people have data they trust at their fingertips.

To schedule a custom demo, visit https://www.comcasttechnologysolutions.com/get-custom-databee-demo

IMPORTANT – DataBee™ does not have its own company profile on ANY platform. DataBee™ can be found on the Comcast Technology Solutions social media platforms under @ComcastTechSoln on X, and here on LinkedIn. #DataBee #HaveYouHeardtheBuzz #SecurityDataFabric

About the Author

Pete Green, vCISO, Cybersecurity Consultant and Reporter for CDM.  Pete Green has over 20 years of experience in Information Technology related fields and is an accomplished practitioner of Information Security. He has held a variety of security operations positions including LAN / WLAN Engineer, Threat Analyst / Engineer, Security Project Manager, Security Architect, Cloud Security Architect, Principal Security Consultant, Manager / Director of IT, CTO, CEO, and Virtual CISO. Pete has worked with clients in a wide variety of industries including federal, state and local government, financial services, healthcare, food services, manufacturing, technology, transportation, and hospitality. Pete holds a Master of Computer Information Systems in Information Security from Boston University, an NSA / DHS National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance / Cyber Defense (CAE IA / CD), and a Master of Business Administration in Informatics.  Pete can be reached online at ([email protected], @petegreen, https://linkedin.com/in/petegreen ) and at our company website https://www.cyberdefensemagazine.com