Cybersecurity specialist Carbon Black Inc., which reportedly plans to go public this year, is expanding its focus beyond breach prevention software.

The company today unveiled a new “managed threat hunting service” based on its Cb Predictive Security Cloud platform. Carbon Black’s entry into the managed security market will increase the competition in what is an already crowded segment. Just this month, another provider called Arctic Wolf Networks Inc. raised $16 million in funding from a group that included Lightspeed Venture Partners.

While the exact value proposition can vary, managed security services are generally designed to address the same basic challenge. Breach prevention tools generate a massive volume of security logs on a day-to-day basis that can be difficult for companies’ network protection teams to thoroughly examine. As a result, breaches pass unnoticed for upwards of weeks in some cases.

Carbon Black says that its new CB ThreatSight service addresses the challenge by enabling organizations to reduce the load on their in-house security teams. The provider’s own network protection experts evaluate the alerts from a customer’s environment, determine if an item provides cause for concern and then prioritize the incidents based on severity.

The idea is that automating the initial log analysis process can free a company’s security team to tackle more pressing tasks. In the same spirit, Carbon uses the data it collects from customer deployments to find potentially noteworthy trends in global hacker activity. The provider notifies organizations of emerging threats that they might normally not have the resources to keep an eye on.

Lastly, Carbon Black promises to provide assistance with resolving breaches after they’re detected. Its experts perform tasks such as connecting the dots between related alerts to help organizations understand the full scope of an attack.

ThreatSight is the second new offering that Carbon Black has introduced in as many months. Previously, the company teamed up with virtualization giant VMware Inc. to develop a joint solution designed to help companies stave off attacks targeting their on-premises data centers.

Image: Carbon Black