Aella Data, a leading innovator in AI-driven cybersecurity solutions, officially exits stealth mode today with the launch of Starlight Pervasive Breach Detection System (PBDS), the industry's first AI-driven pervasively deployable solution. Founded by security industry veterans, Aella Data's Starlight PBDS is the only system that can be deployed pervasively across all network infrastructures. It unifies collected data and conducts advanced analysis to deliver high-fidelity, actionable alerts that reduce detection time from months to mere minutes, and alert volume from thousands to the critical few. The company formally launches at RSA Conference 2018 with a growing list of key customers and partners. 

Aella Data's launch and its disruptive technology is timely in a world gone awry with increasingly costly and far-reaching cyberattacks. "Sophisticated hackers hide in blind spots and unleash damaging attacks while companies work overtime to catch up, but fall short, due mainly to reliance on traditional security solutions," said Richard Stiennon, Chief Research Analyst at IT-Harvest and renowned IT security veteran and analyst.

While the rise of big data and AI are helping companies detect sophisticated attacks, current solutions are still failing to catch breaches, even as their costs and complexity increase. With Starlight, Aella Data introduces a new type of breach detection system that addresses deployment and operational complexity and costs while dramatically reducing detection time and effort. Starlight is built on a patent-pending Distributed Security Intelligence architecture and uses advanced machine learning to cut through the noise, providing high-fidelity alerts that enable fast and effective action. Starlight is easily integrated and highly complementary with existing perimeter defense solutions, SIEMs, and other traditional cybersecurity solutions making it easy for enterprises, Managed Security Services Providers (MSSPs), and VARs to deliver a complete pervasive breach detection solution. As evidence of its unique architecture and ability to scale in all dimensions and deploy anywhere, Aella Data solutions are being used today in a variety of environments and applications, including container visibility, autonomous vehicle security, data centers supporting tens of thousands of servers, and MSSPs supporting mid-sized enterprise customers.

"Aella Data is a perfect breach detection platform for MSSPs due to its multi-tenancy and sophisticated AI that reduces the number of alerts our SOC has to deal with," said Douglas Mannella, Vice President of Business Development at CyFlare, an Aella Data MSSP partner.

Data Breaches on the Rise, Limitations of Current Breach Detection Approaches

2017 was dubbed "The Year of the Data Breach" (source: Bloomberg) and there is no indication that 2018 will be any different. Indeed, the avalanche of cybersecurity breaches demonstrates that existing approaches are still insufficient. These approaches either throw away key data to keep systems manageable or require deployment of costly and invasive monitoring systems. The results are high costs and/or a continued overload of low-fidelity alerts that need to be investigated - but are all too often ignored.

"Headline-grabbing, massive breaches like Equifax and Home Depot are due not just to the rise of cybercriminals but also to the increasing complexity of network and hybrid cloud environments. Legacy IDS, firewalls, and network security solutions alone can no longer meet the needs of the modern enterprise," said Changming Liu, CEO of Aella Data. "We founded Aella Data to help companies address the entire cybersecurity kill chain with a single technology that can be deployed across all environments. By applying deep intelligence through advanced AI with pervasive data, we detect sophisticated attacks other systems miss."

With Starlight, organizations can massively scale security detection across all network infrastructures-including containers, VMs, private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds, and bare metal-with no blind spots, performance problems, or exorbitant costs. Starlight intelligently deploys multiple types of machine learning in a unique approach called Multi-ML, with an integrated cascade of algorithms used across the system for better detection speed, accuracy, and fewer false positives.

Starlight's Key Features

Starlight establishes the new benchmark for breach detection solutions through big data and AI. Some of its unique features include:

• Pervasive Visibility: Aella delivers the industry's first system capable of being deployed across all environments, including containers, public clouds, and VMs in the private data centers and hybrid clouds, collecting data pervasively from every part of the infrastructure.
• Patent pending Distributed Security Intelligence (DSI) architecture with Multi-ML: Allows unprecedented scale, speed, and accuracy by distributing data collection, processing, and breach detection, and applying machine learning across the technology stack.
• Industry first patent pending AellaFlow: Unlike traditional NetFlow used by most other network monitoring and breach detection solutions, AellaFlow reduces raw data up to 100:1 while improving data quality through enrichment, creating unprecedented storage, retention, and analysis opportunities even when collecting massive amounts of data.

The People Behind Aella Data

Aella Data is founded and led by industry veterans from leading companies including NetScreen, Juniper, Fortinet, Barracuda, Cisco, Gigamon, Lastline, A10 Networks, and more. The leadership team includes:

• Changming Liu, Chief Executive Officer, was previously Co-Founder and CTO of Aerohive. Before founding Aerohive he was a Distinguished Engineer at Juniper Networks and a key architect and early member of NetScreen, which completed a successful IPO before being acquired by Juniper Networks.
• John Peterson, Chief Product Officer, was GM and VP at both Comodo Enterprise and Barracuda Networks, and was Co-Founder and CTO of Montego Networks, an InfoWorld 2008 Hot Startup, and held executive roles with NetScreen, Fortinet and Juniper, among others.
• Paul Jespersen, Vice President of Corporate and Business Development, was most recently VP Business Development at Lastline and VP Business Development and Emerging Technologies at Comodo Enterprise, with over 20 years of experience in cybersecurity and networking sales.

Aella Data is backed by NetScreen Co-Founder Feng Deng and his venture firm, Northern Light Venture Capital, as well as various security industry veterans and angel investors in a significant seed round. The company is scaling rapidly and expects to raise additional funding in 2018.