Dive Brief:
- Databricks entered the security field Tuesday with the launch of Lakewatch, an agentic security platform designed to help enterprises defend against AI-powered attacks. The offering is currently in private preview.
- Lakewatch, a security information and event management platform, deploys AI agents to automate detection, triage and threat hunting. The company said the new offering can help security teams respond to threats at “machine speeds” while tackling issues such as incomplete data, legacy workflows and siloed architectures.
- “Security teams can no longer rely on manual workflows to outpace AI-driven attacks,” said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks, in the announcement. “Defenders must have even better visibility and speed than today’s agent attackers.”
Dive Insight:
The proliferation of AI is changing the nature of cyberattacks, with enterprises exposed to targeted, fast-moving threats.
Gaps in governance and guardrails around AI adoption are expanding the attack surface. A report from Akati Sekurity found AI agents are involved in 40% of insider cybersecurity threats, leaving IT teams ill-equipped to manage risks tied to rogue or ungoverned agents.
Databricks’ launch of Lakewatch reflects a broader industry push to align data platforms with cybersecurity solutions to support preventative rather than reactive security solutions.
The provider said the new platform can target current gaps in businesses’ security response, typically restrained by fragmented data environments, manual workflows and high ingestion costs that force organizations to discard up to 75% of their data.
Databricks is not alone in its shift to security, though the company is one of the few in the sector to implement a full-scale rather than step-by-step change.
Vendors such as Snowflake expanded into security-adjacent capabilities like governance, analytics and AI-driven insights. The company offers the features in its AI Data Cloud platform, which houses enterprise data and similarly targets siloing. The company does not yet, however, offer a fully agentic end-to-end security platform like Lakewatch.
Others, including Microsoft and IBM, are embedding security and compliance more deeply into their data ecosystems, further highlighting a convergence between data infrastructure and cybersecurity.
For CIOs, that convergence presents both opportunity and risk. Consolidating security capabilities within a data platform could improve interoperability, reduce data silos and lower costs tied to ingestion and storage.
“Databricks provides the foundation needed to move from data-driven to AI-driven approaches for security operations,” said Karthik Venkatesan, security engineering lead at Adobe, in the announcement. “Lakewatch is an important step toward bringing security intelligence closer to where data already lives.”
