Are you getting ready for the upcoming Black Hat USA 2024 event, an internationally recognized cybersecurity event providing the most technical and relevant information security research, now in its 27th year. The event is quickly approaching, taking place August 3-8, 2024, returning to the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, NV with a 6-day program.
Ahead of the show, VMblog received an exclusive interview with Tucker Callaway, CEO of Mezmo, a leading telemetry data platform. Make sure to add them to your MUST SEE list.
VMblog: Before we get into it, can you give us a quick overview of the company? What should folks know?
Tucker Callaway: Mezmo helps organizations control telemetry data with confidence. Built for enterprise scale, Mezmo’s platform makes it easier to understand data, optimize it, and respond quickly to any incident or data change. Mezmo delivers productivity gains and cost advantage to modern observability, security, and platform engineering teams at hypergrowth startups and Fortune 500 companies.
Mezmo enriches and routes critical telemetry data to existing observability and security platforms so that security teams and others have the information to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any system or application issues quickly. This flexibility ensures that everyone can use their tools of choice and avoid costly vendor lock-in, while also improving collaboration across all roles, creating shared responsibility, eliminating silos, and enabling autonomous teams. Teams can more effectively maintain development velocity, understand and protect against security threats, and deliver positive customer experiences. As our customers’ telemetry data expenses balloon to millions of dollars per year, Mezmo helps optimize ever-increasing volumes of data and ensures that everyone in the organization has access to the right data they need, in the right format and in real time, to minimze data management cost while maximizing the value they get from the data.
VMblog: What is your message to Black Hat attendees coming out to the show this year? If they take back one message about your company, what should it be?
Callaway: Take control of your telemetry data. Ensure that all teams that need access to the data can get the data they need in the right format while meeting all compliance requirements. Accomplish this in a cost-optimal way so that you can get the most value from your security and observability investments. Modern telemetry data platforms, such as Mezmo, help deliver that.
VMblog: Black Hat attendees are known for being security professionals at the forefront of the industry. What specific challenges do you anticipate they’ll be facing, and how will your solutions help them overcome those challenges?
Callaway: We are in times when organizations are reevaluating their security strategies and tooling that operationalizes those strategies. AI/ML is creating numerous possibilities, and we will see the advent of new-generation SIEM solutions. While this is exciting, the data that fuels such new-age tooling must be trustworthy. With Mezmo’s telemetry data platform, security leaders can be confidence their teams have access to the right data to enhance their security posture and minimize compliance risk.
VMblog: How do telemetry pipelines ensure the data that drives AI/ML systems is trustworthy, particularly in terms of redacting PII data?
Callaway: Telemetry pipelines provide data normalization and ensure that the most recent data, of the right data quality, is collected from all sources and is provisioned to AI/ML platforms for insights and decisions. Ensuring data recency and quality, and that it contains the right transformations and enrichments, enables trust in your data. In addition, many situations require that the data sent to AI/ML systems is compliant and free of any PII/sensitive information. Telemetry pipelines can help detect PII information while in motion and either encrypt or redact it to meet the regulatory or bias requirements.
VMblog: What are some of the key takeaways of your solution that Black Hat attendees should be aware of?
Callaway: Modern telemetry pipelines offer tremendous impact and possibility beyond volume reduction to make enterprises more responsive and secure. They take a new data engineering approach that starts with data profiling to understand the data and its quality and then offers ways to optimize the data for timely actionable insights. This empowers organizations to make fast, informed decisions and establish trust in their services and products.
VMblog: The market is a crowded space. What is it about your company and technology that sets you apart from the competition? What are your differentiators?
Callaway: While other telemetry pipelines focus on data movement and control, Mezmo takes a data engineering approach, making telemetry pipelines more intelligent to maximize data value creation. New alerting capabilities and responsive pipelines are other innovative steps in shifting logic into the pipeline and making data more actionable sooner while reducing costs.
Built for complete telemetry data management, Mezmo is breaking through the security and observability market, addressing multiple use cases, from DevOps to security and compliance to ITOps, and delivering a true enterprise telemetry data platform. To differentiate from general-purpose data pipelines (Kafka and Kinesis), Mezmo delivers a set of tools specifically geared toward telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces, events) to increase the observable surface area for enterprises. Mezmo supports open standards (OpenTelemetry) for easy data collection and enriches data-in-motion with contextual information to drive telemetry-related workflows. This is accomplished with out-of-the-box parsers and data transformation processors while maintaining data integrity. Mezmo ensures customers retain ownership of their data and avoid limitations in usage due to having data locked in a single SIEM or observability platform.
VMblog: Looking ahead, what excites you most about the future of cybersecurity, and how do you see your company playing a role in shaping it?
Callaway: There is so much value in data. This is something I believe we’ve always known, but before we really had a chance to make the most of it, we experienced an explosion in volume – especially when it comes to telemetry data. We’ve seen other technologies try to ingest and make sense of this data – traditional observability, SIEM, and other analytics platforms – but costs quickly become prohibitive, and waiting for data to reach these tools can impact resolution times and cause teams to miss important signals.
We’re excited to be part of the world of data that is helping companies make sense of and better manage and optimize the data they have, at scale. Shifting the logic into telemetry pipelines like Mezmo helps companies harness timely insights from complete data sets. Our customers can process terabytes – even petabytes – of data originating from multiple sources and address unexpected events or issues such as misconfigurations that can cause data spikes and excessive overages. As companies invest in modernizing their SIEM and evaluating AI/ML possibilities, we are excited to provide trusted data to fuel these initiatives.
We recently worked with analyst firm 451 on a business impact brief that determined telemetry pipelines are instrumental in providing security and IT teams with visibility into the types of data being collected and the information that data contains. There is huge value, for example, when it comes to using pipelines to recognize sensitive data (PII, financial data, HIPAA, etc., which can be found in raw chat and email logs or in application queries. This data can be redacted, masked, or encrypted before it is processed by analytics and security applications or sent to long-term storage. Preprocessing this data can prevent an errant leak – a huge advantage in privacy, security, and compliance for highly regulated industries.
VMblog: Is your company involved in any parties during the event? How can attendees get involved?
Callaway: We’re very excited to partner with Night Dragon, the leading venture capital firm for cybersecurity, security, safety, and privacy, in various Black Hat events. Join us Tuesday, Aug. 6, 5-8:30 p.m., in the Foundation Room on the 63rd floor of Mandalay Bay Resort, for Night Dragon’s Black Hat Kickoff Party. The Mezmo team will be available to meet throughout the week in the Mandalay Bay Hotel. To reserve your time to meet us, send us a note at [email protected].
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