Sqrrl, a startup with links to the NSA, has announced a new update to its Big Data security platform that’s built around technology used to protect the US from terrorist attacks and other national security threats. In addition, the company has just secured $7 million in Series B funding to help build out its customer base and further develop its offerings.

Sqrrl Enterprise 2.0 is built on the Apache Accumulo platform, which was developed by the NSA as a way to store super-sensitive documents and only allow authorized people to access them. The NSA released Accumulo as an open source project in 2011, and venture-backed Sqrrl was founded the following year by former NSA engineers to commercialize Accumulo. The platform is essentially a key-value store that lets admins assign access privileges at the cell level, providind advanced functionality to safeguard sensitive data.

The new release expands on this premise, providing a “full stack security analytics solution for detecting and responding to advanced cybersecurity threats”, says the company in its press release. Sqrrl Enterprise 2.0 does so by unifying organizations’ security, network, endpoints and user data into a single platform. Security professionals can then easily detect and respond to advanced data breaches resulting from cyber espionage, insider misuse, and other types of hard to detect attacks.

“Sqrrl is at the intersection of two of the most important trends facing the enterprise: cybersecurity and Big Data,” says new Sqrrl investor, Zenas Hutcheson of Rally Ventures. “Sqrrl’s technology can help both Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies prevent themselves from becoming the next cyber incident headline.”

In the event that an organization does become the next major headline, Sqrrl Enterprise 2.0 also helps to enable deep forensic investigations that can speed up the recovery process, thanks to the way it unites and stores various datasets.

Sqrrl’s architecture is built around a variety of Big Data technologies, including Hadoop, machine learning, data analysis, advanced visualization and Data Centric Security.

“Our heritage is about putting Big Data technologies to work against hard, intractable problems,” says Sqrrl CEO Mark Terenzoni. “With the Sqrrl 2.0 launch we are focusing these capabilities on the challenges posed by the cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities that nearly every organization faces today.”

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