How Onum's Real-Time Trace Correlation Transforms Security Incident Response

The difference between a contained security incident and a devastating breach often comes down to time. When security teams are hamstrung by slow, disconnected systems that take minutes—or worse, hours—to correlate and analyze security data, attackers gain the advantage. This timing gap isn't just an inconvenience; it represents a critical vulnerability in your security posture with substantial business implications.

With attackers moving at machine speed and the average cost of system downtime up to an estimated $9,000 per minute (although it varies widely based on industry), organizations simply can't afford the luxury of delayed detection and response. The need for real-time incident response capabilities has never been more urgent.

Traditional security operations rely heavily on a reactive approach—collecting data from disparate sources, centralizing it in a SIEM or data lake, and then analyzing it to identify potential threats. This process, while thorough, introduces delays between when suspicious activity occurs and when security teams can actually respond.

The business impact of these delays is profound. The average cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million in 2024—a 10% increase from the previous year—according to IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024. Extended Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) metrics directly translate to operational downtime and wider attack exposure, with every additional minute an attacker remains undetected providing opportunities to move laterally, escalate privileges, or exfiltrate more data.

Beyond immediate financial impact, security incidents erode customer trust and damage brand reputation—effects that can linger long after the technical aspects of a breach have been remediated.

The industry has long accepted extended detection and response times as an unavoidable reality. But what if there's a fundamentally different approach that could transform security incident response from minutes to milliseconds?

Onum's platform represents a paradigm shift in security operations, moving from post-hoc analysis to real-time intelligence at the point of ingest. At the heart of this transformation is the ability to identify, enrich, and contextualize security events as they happen—not minutes later.

Traditional security tools collect logs and alerts, then try to make sense of them after they've been stored. Onum takes a fundamentally different approach:

1. Data Processing at the Edge: Instead of centralizing raw data before analysis, Onum processes data at the source, dramatically reducing the time between event occurrence and detection.

2. Layered Telemetry Correlation: Our platform employs a sophisticated, multi-stage correlation approach—first identifying anomalies, then enriching them with relevant context, and finally evaluating them against historical behavioral patterns.

3. Contextual Enrichment: When a potential security event is detected, Onum can instantly enrich it with critical contextual data from multiple sources—user information from Active Directory, asset details from your CMDB, and threat intelligence—providing comprehensive understanding without manual correlation.

4. Millisecond Decision Making: With all necessary context available immediately, security teams can triage and contain in real time, not after the fact.

Onum's architecture was built specifically to enable security teams to diagnose issues faster, identify root causes more accurately, and implement containment measures before threats can spread.

The impact of real-time trace correlation on security operations extends far beyond just faster detection. It fundamentally changes how security teams operate, moving from reactively responding to alerts to proactively diagnosing and containing threats.

"Our point is to shift left the computation in terms of correlation," says Lucas Varela, co-founder and CTO at Onum. "You can reduce data using one action in our data pipelines, but the interesting point is that we want to move computation, correlation, and your way of thinking in terms of what you need to do with your data to get real-time insights."

One of the most persistent challenges in security operations is the fragmentation of security data. Alerts from endpoint protection, network monitoring, identity systems, and cloud environments all provide valuable signals, but they often lack the context needed to understand the full picture.

Onum's trace correlation capabilities bridge this gap by connecting disparate signals, providing attack context, and enabling rapid triage of security events. By automatically linking related events across different systems and enriching them with critical details about the users, systems, and data involved, security teams can quickly assess the scope and impact of an incident and focus on the most critical threats first.

The value of Onum's real-time capabilities is clearly reflected in improved security metrics:

MTTD measures the average amount of time it takes to identify a security issue. With conventional security tools, this can often extend to days or even weeks, giving attackers ample time to achieve their objectives. A lower MTTD minimizes the time a hacker can operate undetected, reducing the potential damage and scope of a security incident.

Onum's real-time trace correlation capabilities can reduce MTTD from hours or days to mere milliseconds by identifying anomalous behavior at the point of ingest, analyzing patterns across multiple data sources simultaneously, and applying machine learning to recognize subtle indicators of compromise.

MTTR refers to the total time needed to resolve an issue once it's been detected, including actions like identifying the scope of the incident, isolating affected systems, and implementing fixes.

Onum can reduce MTTR by providing comprehensive context immediately, eliminating time-consuming manual investigation and enabling precise containment through detailed understanding of affected systems. By slashing both MTTD and MTTR, Onum's trace correlation capabilities dramatically reduce the window of opportunity for attackers, minimizing the potential impact of security incidents.

To illustrate the power of Onum's real-time trace correlation, consider a common security challenge: detecting and responding to insider threats.

In a traditional security environment, suspicious user activity might generate isolated alerts across multiple systems. Security analysts would need to manually gather data from various sources, analyze access patterns, and determine whether the activity represents a genuine threat. 

With Onum, the same scenario plays out entirely differently:

1. A user attempts to access sensitive data outside their normal pattern of behavior

2. Onum immediately detects this anomaly at the point of ingest

3. Within milliseconds, the platform enriches this event with:

4. The user's identity and role information from Active Directory

5. Historical access patterns for this user and similar roles

6. Details about the sensitivity of the targeted data

7. Security teams receive an alert with complete context, enabling immediate assessment and response

What would have taken hours of investigation and correlation in a traditional security environment is accomplished in milliseconds, enabling security teams to intervene before data exfiltration can occur.

One of the most powerful aspects of Onum's platform is how easily it integrates into existing security ecosystems. Unlike solutions that require wholesale replacement of security tools, Onum complements and enhances your current investments.

Onum is designed to work in hybrid, distributed environments, supporting any type of installation across on-premises data centers, public cloud environments (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), private cloud deployments, and hybrid architectures. This flexibility ensures that organizations can implement real-time trace correlation capabilities without disrupting their existing security infrastructure.

Seamlessly connect with your security ecosystem, including SIEMs and log management platforms, endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools, network monitoring solutions, and identity and access management systems. By enhancing rather than replacing these tools, Onum allows organizations to maximize the value of their security investments while adding critical real-time capabilities.

Implementing real-time trace correlation doesn't just improve security—it delivers measurable business value through cost avoidance, operational efficiency, and competitive advantage.

By reducing both MTTD and MTTR, Onum helps organizations avoid the substantial costs associated with security incidents. According to research from IBM, "breaches taking over 200 days to identify and contain cost organizations over $1 million more on average" than those detected and contained more quickly.

The business impact is tangible: lower breach costs through early detection and containment, reduced downtime during security incidents, and decreased investigation and remediation costs. Security teams can handle more alerts with the same resources, and analysts spend less time on manual correlation and investigation, making response actions more precise and effective.

Cybersecurity Ventures projects that the global cost of cybercrime will reach $10.5 trillion this year. In this environment, organizations that can detect and respond to threats in real-time gain a strategic advantage through enhanced security posture and better protection of customer data.

Organizations with faster incident response times demonstrate better regulatory compliance and enable security teams to shift from reactive firefighting to proactive threat hunting. As cybersecurity becomes an increasingly important factor in business reputation, the ability to prevent breaches through real-time detection provides a clear market differentiator.

Organizations can no longer afford the extended detection and response times associated with traditional security approaches. The gap between when suspicious activity occurs and when security teams can respond represents a critical vulnerability—one that attackers are increasingly adept at exploiting.

Onum's real-time trace correlation capabilities close this gap, enabling security teams to detect, diagnose, and respond to threats in milliseconds rather than minutes. By transforming the fundamental approach to security operations, Onum doesn't just improve security metrics—it enables a level of protection that wasn't previously possible.

As we move into an era where threats move at machine speed, the ability to match this pace with real-time detection and response isn't just a competitive advantage—it's a business necessity. Organizations that embrace this real-time approach will be better positioned to protect their critical assets, maintain customer trust, and navigate the increasingly complex security landscape.

Ready to transform your security operations with real-time trace correlation? 

Book a demo today and see how Onum can reduce your MTTD and MTTR from minutes to milliseconds.