AI-powered observability offering designed to deliver operational insights while letting customer agencies maintain control of data
By Donny Jackson, Editor, Urgent Communications
Coralogix anticipates that its AI-powered observability platform will earn a FedRAMP Moderate authorization this year, allowing it to pursue an even greater security certification that could position the company to serve public-safety and other critical-infrastructure entities, according to CEO and co-founder Ariel Assaraf.
Assaraf said the Coralogix platform has completed all preliminary FedRAMP requirements and that the US Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid (FSA) has agreed to serve as the company’s official sponsoring agency for the FedRAMP Moderate authorization. Coralogix should be FedRAMP Moderate certified “before mid-year, for sure,” Assaraf said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications.
Getting to this stage of FedRAMP has been challenging, with Assaraf comparing the process to a “root canal.” But such detailed standards and testing are understandable, given the nature of the information that must be protected appropriately while being handled by platforms like the one provided by Coralogix.
“The amount of data that you record—and the amount of data that we keep—is very sensitive,” Assaraf said. “So, the amount of compliance requirements that we have to go through is in the hundreds.
“It took us awhile. We needed to change a lot of how we operate and how we build and run our software.”
And Coralogix officials do not plan to stop at the FedRAMP Moderate level, Assaraf said. He said that the company wants to be authorized as FedRAMP High, which is the most stringent level in the federal security program—a status that would qualify Coralogix to offer services to public-safety and critical-infrastructure entities.
“That’s exactly the reason why we’re going for FedRAMP High—to serve those specific agencies,” Assaraf said.
“You know it’s a lift to go for FedRAMP Moderate, and FedRAMP High is even worse. But we wouldn’t go through that, if not for the opportunity that we’re seeing.
“The initial [customer targets after being certified as FedRAMP High] probably would be around 911, FBI and so on, where there’s a huge amount of data, real-time miscounts, they need to own it, they need the transparency, they need to keep it very long term, and the cost savings are also something that we see the federal agencies care about a lot.”
Coralogix’s ability to provide these attributes in a highly secure manner is partly attributable to its platform architecture, which executes its AI-powered analysis of data in near real time as the information is being streamed from various sources to a storage location controlled by the customer agency, Assaraf said.
This is a very different approach than the one used by many competitors in the observability space, Assaraf said.
“If you think of other solutions, when you send your data, they say, ‘I own your data now,’ Assaraf said. “It doesn’t matter if it is on-prem or on-cloud—they own your data, in the sense that they format it in their own proprietary format that they use, and they store it into their own storage … You need to go through them, if you need to access that data. And if you need longer attention, you’ve got to pay more.
“In essence, think about it this way: you’re generating data, and everyone understands how valuable that data is—especially now with AI and what you can extract from data. But now you’ve got to pay a lease to hold that data—your data—for longer, and you can’t access it without that new gatekeeper you brought in the middle.”
“The Coralogix’s architecture says, ‘We’re going to analyze everything in the stream, and we’re going to store it on your own storage in an open format that doesn’t require us for access’ … I think the biggest factor is now you can control your data in stream.”
Such data control is particularly important for government agencies and critical-infrastructure entities that must adhere to strict requirements regarding data privacy, data protection and public transparency—goals that are difficult to achieve while using separate vendors to address different functional needs, according to Assaraf.
“Today [separate solutions] will be gated as different companies for different users with data that cannot be served outside,” Assaraf said. “It will be a short retention, so when the new administration comes, they’re not going to be able to even see the data of the previous administration.
“Now, think of a world where we keep it and archive it for so long that the next administration can go back four years and perform a full audit. Think about the transparency opportunity that this brings and the accountability that this actually requires from the agencies.”
