Vulcan Cyber Brings Scalability, Speed and AI Magic to Cybersecurity With Snowflake

The number of cyber attacks worldwide increases rapidly year-on-year, and keeping up with those threats is a full-time job — one which reputations and finances depend on. Vulcan Cyber, with their ExposureOS platform, helps customers reduce risk across their entire attack surface, providing a holistic view of which threats lie where and how to mitigate them. 

The Vulcan Cyber ExposureOS platform compiles security findings from diverse tools, correlates and deduplicates the data, and enriches it with business context and threat intelligence to prioritize risks based on their actual impact on the organization. It streamlines the entire remediation process by orchestrating and automating actions, and providing clear, actionable remediation guidance. It also offers customizable risk reporting tailored to the needs of different stakeholders, ensuring that security efforts align with business priorities and are communicated effectively.

“It can be incredibly complex to prioritize your risks appropriately according to factors like threat intelligence and business context,” says Tal Marom, VP of Product at Vulcan Cyber. “That’s where we come in.”

At the heart of all of this is Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud. Vulcan Cyber uses the platform to store and manage its entire data landscape, while also providing a foundation for its increasingly advanced analytics work.  

Gaining accurate insights into threat landscapes, and mitigating those threats, can be a mammoth task. And it’s a journey that looks different for every organization. 

To help its clients, Vulcan Cyber provides what it calls “the one platform to reduce exposure to risk.” Vulcan Cyber ExposureOS compiles risk and asset data and threat intelligence from over 100 different sources, merging it with customer-specific business context to provide a holistic risk score and prioritize vulnerabilities. But this is just the first step. 

“We also help our clients to orchestrate the entire remediation process,” says Marom. “This involves integrating with ticketing tools and providing guidance around what scripts to apply and what patches need to be done. There are even full automation options, so our customers can choose to automate this process entirely.”

Providing these capabilities requires a huge amount of data. The company uses Snowflake on AWS as a central data store for all its activities to help provide in-depth insights in a timely manner. 

"For large enterprise customers, scalability and speed are essential features in our platform.” says Marom. “It’s crucial that our customers can see things at accelerated speed, which means we need to ingest huge data sets — and Snowflake is integral to that.”

As with many industries, artificial intelligence has a huge role to play in cybersecurity. With Snowflake’s unified data platform at the heart of its activities, Vulcan Cyber is delivering AI capabilities to help provide its clients with the insights they need, exactly when they need them. 

“Snowflake gives us a foundation for innovation and adding advanced features to our platform. We can go beyond scale and speed and explore new capabilities for our customers,” says Marom.

These features include an AI-driven text-to-query search bar within the platform that makes navigation and information retrieval seamless and intuitive. With the search bar accessible from every page, users can effortlessly input queries in natural language and access any piece of data, page or action, streamlining workflows and reducing time spent navigating.

The search engine uses machine learning to understand user needs and recommend actions tailored to their environment. By analyzing search patterns, such as frequently queried vulnerabilities, it also personalizes results, ensuring users can immediately access relevant actions like patching or reporting.

The organization has also deployed AI to provide vital summaries of common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) to help keep customers up to date with the latest threats.

“We use generative AI to produce new, human-readable IDs for discovered CVEs, reducing analysis time from hours to minutes by offering immediate clarity on their root cause,” says Marom. “With this enhancement, users can quickly grasp the nature of the CVE and its potential impact. This is another significant step toward making the Vulcan Cyber ExposureOS more action-driven, empowering users to make faster decisions and streamline remediation efforts.”

The Snowflake team was able to build the AI model that generates these insights in a single day.

With Snowflake as the infrastructure behind ExposureOS, Vulcan Cyber has been able to add new capabilities that deliver three vital benefits to its customers. 

The first is efficiency. By integrating AI and having all its threat data on a unified infrastructure, Vulcan Cyber can provide complex information in a way that is simple to navigate and significantly reduces the number of steps required for critical actions, such as identifying high-priority vulnerabilities or assigning tasks to IT. This means fewer actions, automated workflows, and intelligent shortcuts that help users access exactly what they need, exactly when they need it. 

The second benefit is the platform’s ability to provide a clear path to successful outcomes. Vulcan Cyber has designed ExposureOS to guide users toward clear actions, such as patching high-risk vulnerabilities within minutes, directly improving their security posture and reducing risk exposure. By highlighting what actions users need to take, and giving them the flexibility to act right away, the company can help ensure vulnerabilities are remediated before they can be exploited.

Finally, personalization. “Risks are very much dependent on their environment and context; it’s going to be different for every security team,” says Marom. “We want to incorporate more personalization in our platform to ensure everyone gets the most relevant solutions for their use cases and preferences.”

Ultimately, these capabilities are allowing the company to grow alongside its clients.

“Snowflake’s fast, scalable data ingestion allows us to seamlessly support large enterprises, which is a big business advantage. It provides us with a sturdy foundation so we can constantly improve our platform to deliver an exceptional experience to our customers and add new capabilities to meet evolving demands.”

Going forward, Vulcan Cyber plans to further experiment with AI, working alongside Snowflake to provide new capabilities to its customers. As the company and its customers continue to grow, it has a data platform that can grow alongside it. 

It’s a partnership that is allowing Vulcan Cyber to go beyond what was previously possible. “Conversations between the two companies are super productive,” Marom says. “It truly feels like we’re working together to accomplish something and they’re always there to make sure the features we release are working exactly as intended.”