In today’s cybersecurity landscape, security teams face a twin crisis: the overwhelming cost and volume of data, and the latency and complexity of traditional analysis pipelines. While the sheer expense of storing petabytes of logs in traditional Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems forces painful data deletion, VAST has already solved this SIEM cost crisis by offering a scalable cyber lakehouse for affordable long-term data retention (read our previous post here).
However, eliminating deletion is only the first step. The true threat to the modern Security Operations Center (SOC) is the latency created by complex, fragmented pipelines, which means threats move faster than detection. To truly modernize the SOC, we must move beyond passive data storage to an active, real-time compute foundation. This is the role of the VAST cyber lakehouse, powered by the VAST AI Operating System.
The Latency Killer: Why ETL Fails Threat Detection
Legacy security pipelines rely on data gravity - the friction created by moving data multiple times (from source to lake, to SIEM, to analytics tools). This ETL-based friction is the latency killer that prevents real-time response.
The VAST AI OS, featuring the newly generally available VAST DataEngine, is the antidote. DataEngine is a serverless, event-driven compute layer that brings intelligence to your security data without copying it.
This process is powered by two key capabilities:
VAST Event Broker: A built-in, Kafka-compatible service that streams logs directly from sources into a built-in, Kafka-compatible service. The VAST DataEngine then uses serverless Python functions to automatically and continuously process data as it arrives. These functions parse, enrich, and write structured logs into VAST DataBase tables. This tightly integrated workflow replaces brittle external ETL pipelines, creating a simpler and more reliable path from ingestion to analysis.
Serverless Functions: These lightweight Python functions enable event-driven automation and run adjacent to your data. They automatically parse, enrich, and triage raw logs in-place, freeing your analysts from manual log management and giving them structured, enriched data instantly.
This architecture doesn’t just reduce cost (as we covered in our previous post); it eliminates the performance bottlenecks of data movement, allowing your security team to operate at the speed of the threat.
From Keyword Search to AI-Powered Discovery
The VAST cyber lakehouse is the essential foundation for advanced AI in the SOC. Once data is instantly available and curated, the VAST InsightEngine workflow automates sophisticated threat analysis.
InsightEngine automates the entire process of making your security data actionable for AI agents and RAG-based threat hunting.
Here is the automated AI-Powered Threat Investigation workflow in action:
Real-Time Ingestion: Enterprise-scale security logs are ingested via the VAST Event Broker and are automatically processed and loaded into VAST DataBase tables, ensuring a continuous flow of structured information for analysis.
Agentic Triage: An initial AI agent is triggered by incoming log events, pulling data from the VAST DataBase to classify and prioritize which events require immediate analysis.
Human-in-the-Loop Approval: A security analyst reviews the high-priority event summary before proceeding with a full investigation.
Context Research and Synthesis: An AI agent queries the vector store in the VAST DataBase to find historically similar events and relevant threat intelligence reports. This information is synthesized from the triaged event with this historical context to generate a comprehensive report with recommended actions.
This tightly integrated workflow is the key to building and deploying custom AI agents that truly augment your SOC, allowing them to detect and respond to complex, evolving threats that traditional systems simply miss.
The Future is a Unified, Active SOC
VAST’s cyber lakehouse is fundamentally changing the economics of security, but more importantly, it is creating the unified SOC necessary for the AI era.
By leveraging the VAST DataEngine to activate your data and power real-time AI workflows, your security team can achieve unprecedented speed and efficiency. Stop building brittle, slow pipelines and start building a future-proof, active defense platform today.
You can see the cyber lakehouse in action in this demo.
