Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Red Lambda: Security Revolution Or Just Evolution?: Page 3 of 3

Red Lambda uses the term "neural foam" to describe its "neural network" analysis approach. Now, original neural networks in artificial intelligence and data mining
required significant user training, which is not possible for real-time detection. Instead, Red Lambda does not just examine individual sessions of data; it examines them all
to create clusters of correlated data. IT can compress billions of individual events into a few hundred clusters, identify the virtual fingerprints and display graphically data into a visual form that security analysts can drill down into to determine what anomalous behavior is threat oriented and what is not.

Red Lambda is a software-only company whose foundational product is AppIron, which enables a grid architecture connected to all devices that are subject to potential threats. The architecture enables inbound data streams to be fully processed in parallel, and data only comes to rest after it has been acted upon.

MetaGrid is the software that sits on top of the base operational software engine AppIron and actually does the work, such as detecting operational anomalies. For
example, Wikileaks is known for releasing U.S government documents that the government did not want released. In at least one case, the person who accessed the data to give to Wikileaks downloaded gigabits of information. MetaGrid understands the directionality of data and, as such, may have detected that this was an anomalous
situation and stopped it. But MetaGrid does not just analyze real-time data; in one case, it was used as part of a cleansing process to detect anomalous situations in a year’s worth of carrier call records, which can amount to billions of records per day.

First the caveats. No one security product can do everything or is a panacea, not even Red Lambda. Next, other vendors are likely to claim that they do most if not all or even more of what Red Lambda does (even though they really can’t). Third, it is too early to get detailed feedback from a significant number of Red Lambda users, and no independent benchmarks have been done. Fourth, Red Lambda’s business execution (such as the right product development strategy and go-to-market strategy) has yet to be demonstrated.

So it is much too premature to determine whether or not Red Lambda will ever be a heavyweight contender in the security space or simply act as a complement to existing technologies. That may depend upon whether its technology turns out to be evolutionary or revolutionary (for which Red Lambda used the term "disruptive
evolution"). However, the company has a very exciting idea that seems to offer a breath of fresh air in the security industry. The bad guys are extremely clever, but hopefully innovative good guys can be even more clever. If so, then the good guys have a chance of winning, and Red Lamdba should be one of the companies earning a well-deserved reward.

At the time of publication, Red Lambda is not a client of David Hill and the Mesabi
Group.