LookingGlass is a company on the front lines in the battle to keep information secure. Experts in threat intelligence driven security, LookingGlass provides a suite of products that help organizations understand the threats to their infrastructure - threats emanating from both inside and out. Because you can’t react to threats that you don’t know are there.
Information security threats are a constant risk in today’s industry. Hackers find new exploits to penetrate system infrastructure, information system complexity is increasing rapidly, and attack vectors increase as the number of connected devices explode. To combat this growing problem, LookingGlass needed to build an advanced, next generation system.
The vision was for a tool that would start with a raw stream of events and queryable visualization of the data, allowing the analysts to make informed decisions. To ensure that their next generation system was as robust as the threats, LookingGlass chose Clojure.
They began the transition to Clojure in late 2014 and the advantages became clear immediately: “Adoption of the Clojure language was a strategic decision to support the company’s next generation technology needs to include ease of integration on the JVM, a robust concurrency support structure, and functional composition that efficiently isolates system construction. All of this fits nicely with network-based threat intelligence in which scalability, discrete event processing, and data processing are paramount” says Director of Engineering Chris Wood.
To accelerate development of their next generation system, LookingGlass partnered with Cognitect. Cognitect consultants worked closely with LookingGlass engineers to review the system architecture, propose significant performance-enhancing adjustments, develop an iterative plan to construct the system, and ensure the software application followed Clojure best practices throughout the full stack.
Throughout the engagement, Cognitect consultants were keenly aware of the system implications to architectural decisions and effort involved in those decisions. During each iteration, the team planned the work, built it, and measured its performance across the system. This level of experience enabled LookingGlass to make careful decisions that optimized their specific business needs with technical robustness.
Chris Wood explained “Largely because of this partnership with Cognitect, LookingGlass successfully delivered a threat intelligence platform to the marketplace capable of housing more than a billion discrete threat observations overlaid on a global internet topology, while returning general purpose search results within seconds. By working alongside the Cognitect consultants, LookingGlass engineers were able to get the most out of Clojure.”