Comcast likes its internally-developed cybersecurity data fabric so much that it thinks other Fortune 500 companies will want to use it too. So, it’s teamed with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Snowflake to get the hosting, storage and compute power it needs to transform the fabric into a commercial offering, which it calls DataBee.
While Comcast is well-known as a cable operator, the company also has a Technology Solutions (CTS) unit charged with bringing its top-tier internal solutions to market. In the past, these have included telecom, media and advertising products. DataBee is the first product to come out of CTS’ new cybersecurity division, which was formed in the fall of 2022.
Nicole Bucala, VP and GM of DataBee at Comcast, told Silverlinings the DataBee fabric was first developed by Comcast Chief Information Security Officer Noopur Davis about three years ago to help the operator’s governance and compliance, security and threat hunting teams crunch data from disparate sources and answer critical questions faster. By combining a variety of data sets – including security logs and business context – Comcast was able to not only glean insights more rapidly, but also reduce costs by deduplicating data stored by different teams and cut down on false positives.
“All of your security tooling will throw off logs and insights, so we take all of that. We also take business context,” like organization chart data which shows who works for who, Bucala said. “This is actually the key secret sauce to what we do. We are able to marry business context with the security sources, which has been very challenging to do so far in the security industry.”
After chatting with CISO peers at Fortune 500 companies, Davis concluded Comcast should take its system public, Bucala said. And so it is. Bucala said an initial version of DataBee is available to a handful of initial customers who have agreed to work with Comcast as design partners. There’s also a waitlist of Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 companies looking to get their hands on the product. Bucala said Comcast is hoping to wrap up the design phase in the second half of 2023.
The commercial version of DataBee is initially targeting cybersecurity use cases, providing security analysis, decisioning, response and security controls assurance. However, Bucala said it could potentially also be deployed for other use cases, such as privacy, risk management or IT operations, in the future.
Cloud is key
According to Bucala, the cloud plays a role across all aspects of DataBee, from input to compute to output.
She noted data inputs from customers can come from applications running either on-premises or in the cloud. DataBee itself runs in AWS, where the input data is ingested and normalized for analysis. The insights it spits out are then deposited into a customer data lake, which is being supplied by Snowflake.
Bucala said Comcast decided to start out by running DataBee on AWS because it is a “great platform to create a SaaS offering on.” The choice of Snowflake stemmed from Comcast’s desire to select a provider which was already popular among its target market of Fortune 500 customers and had a strong track record of scalability.
Eventually, though, Bucala said Comcast is hoping to run DataBee in multiple clouds – including Microsoft and Google Cloud – and expand its data lake partners.
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