IronNet Cybersecurity Inc. a five-year-old security intelligence company founded by a group of former national security officials and Beltway insiders, is making its principal collaboration platform available free to qualifying organizations.

The company charges some enterprise customers a significant though undisclosed sum annually for the service, which is called IronDome. It enables participating organizations to anticipate threats by applying behavioral analytics and machine learning techniques to network traffic data. By scouring logs submitted by customers and correlating activity patterns with threats, the technology can identify suspicious behavior patterns often before customers are aware of it, said Michael Ehrlich, IronNet’s chief technology officer.

“We take millions of events a day from our customer set and push them into a big correlation engine to provide situational awareness back to our customers,” he said. That insight is particularly useful for smaller companies that lack dedicated cybersecurity resources. “I can tell you that while you may be seeing something for the first time, others have seen it,” Ehrlich said.

IronNet said the new initiative, announced today, is primarily aimed at small and midsize businesses, which are often the entry point for cyberattacks that later spread to larger companies through partner networks. The company’s core business is in critical infrastructure industries such as energy and healthcare, where public safety is at risk in the event of an attack.

IronNet claims six of the largest U.S. electric utilities are IronDome customers. Utilities, in particular, “have continually asked us if it’s possible to push this technology down to the energy providers they rely on,” Ehrlich said.

The free service isn’t confined to small companies. Organizations of any size can register and each application will be evaluated on its own merits, the company said. “I don’t want to say there’s no company size that’s ineligible,” Ehrlich said, “but if United Airlines called up we’d probably say, ‘Hey, guys, you should be part of the normal solution.’”

Users of the free service need to have some logging or network data collection capability. Paying customers will get dedicated logging software and a higher level of customer service. IronNet reasons that the addition of more data from nonpaying customers will improve the quality of its database.

Founded by two former top officials at U.S. Cyber Command, IronNet has raised more than $110 million in funding. Its other principal product is IronDefense, a massively scalable network traffic analysis platform that uses behavioral analysis to detect complex cyber threats.

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