Axiom BYOB extracts maximum value from event data

The ever-growing volume of event data on enterprise networks holds the key to valuable insights, improved operations, and new innovation. Yet many companies don’t capture or keep most of this information – they’re constrained by the limits of traditional event data management software. Axiom’s Bring Your Own Bucket (BYOB) feature — a major technical leap — removes limitations and empowers customers to maximize the value of their event data in new uses across the organization like never before.

Axiom was founded for future scalability

Axiom was born out of a pressing need. My cofounders and I discovered that tracking logs for their project using conventional tools like Splunk or even open-source software like Elastic would cost more than running the project itself. This realization sparked a vision: to create a solution that not only disrupted the cost paradigm but also scaled to meet the exponential growth in event data volumes.

Traditional products were simply not designed to handle the 10-100x workloads that loomed on the horizon. As event data increasingly became informational bedrock for entire companies, a new approach was needed. Axiom was architected from the ground up not to compete with existing log management, but to replace it with a data foundation for the whole organization.

The cloud conundrum: SaaS silos

The shift to cloud components, including Axiom itself, has also introduced a new frustration: SaaS silos. These isolated islands of data, hard to interconnect, have become an accepted but suboptimal reality for many businesses. As event data grows more critical across various organizational functions, these silos are increasingly problematic.

1. Event data for observability that provides crucial insights for DevOps teams could also inform product decisions if accessible to product managers.
2. Security event logs, typically siloed in SIEM apps, could offer valuable context for performance optimization if available to infrastructure teams.
3. Product usage data, often trapped in analytics platforms, could enhance customer support interactions if readily accessible to support teams.

What too many still don’t realize is that the same events are present in each of these silos. There’s no such thing as a “security event” versus a “product usage event” — rather, every event could be relevant to security in the right context.

Many companies attempt to work around these silos by duplicating data using tools like Kafka or Vector. But data consistency issues often complicate matters, moving organizations no closer to the single source of truth they desire.

Axiom breaks open the silos

With BYOB Axiom has chosen to be part of the solution, not the problem. Axiom’s brand promise goes beyond mere observability – Axiom offers the flexibility that dedicated observability vendors can't match. This is because Axiom was designed from the outset to be scalable and flexible, to serve as a foundation for organizational intelligence across multiple domains.

To shatter the SaaS silos, Axiom created the BYOB option. This feature allows customers to use their own S3 bucket as the storage backend for Axiom, effectively putting their data back in their own hands while still leveraging Axiom's powerful ingestion and query capabilities.

BYOB: your data in your hands

Implementing BYOB was no small feat. It’s not as simple as switching a storage point in AWS. Moreover, BYOB’s performance and efficiency far exceed what an in-house solution, such as routing log data to a Parquet datastore, would deliver — Parquet is nowhere near optimized or flexible enough for the specific task of persisting and querying event data as required to understand, secure and optimize today’s massively scaled, distributed serverless cloud-native apps. BYOB gives you more analytic power on less storage space.

BYOB required a fundamental rethinking of Axiom’s architecture, and a deep dive into the intricacies of cloud storage systems. Here's a glimpse into the technical challenges that Axiom engineers overcame:

1. Performance Optimization: To maintain our high-performance standards despite potential network latency, we implemented a sophisticated caching layer and optimized our data access patterns specifically for S3. Axiom significantly outperforms Athena and in-house solutions.
2. Data Integrity and Consistency: We developed a robust system to ensure data integrity when writing to and reading from customer-owned buckets. This involved implementing advanced checksum algorithms and retry mechanisms to handle potential network issues.
3. Security and Access Control: We designed a secure method for Axiom to access customer buckets without compromising security. This involved integrating with AWS IAM roles and implementing just-in-time access provisions.
4. Scalability: We re-engineered our data partitioning strategy to ensure efficient querying across potentially massive datasets stored in customer buckets.
5. Compatibility: We ensured that all of Axiom's advanced features, from real-time analytics to long-term data retention, work seamlessly with BYOB.

Real-World BYOB breakthroughs

With BYOB, organizations can now unlock new value from their event data — value they often don’t realize is there until they have 100% of their events on hand to analyze. Here are some real-world scenarios:

1. Cross-Functional Data Analysis: A software company uses Axiom with BYOB to store all their event data – from application logs to user behavior analytics. Their data science team can now run machine learning models directly on this data to predict customer churn, while the product team uses the same dataset to analyze feature adoption rates.
2. Compliance and Data Sovereignty: A healthcare provider leverages BYOB to keep patient data within their own infrastructure, ensuring compliance with HIPAA regulations. Simultaneously, they use Axiom's powerful querying capabilities to derive insights to improve patient care.
3. Long-Term Data Retention and Analysis: A financial services firm uses BYOB to retain trading data for regulatory purposes. With Axiom, they can also analyze years of historical data to identify long-term market trends, without moving the data out of their controlled environment.

Quantifying the value

While it's challenging to put an exact dollar figure on BYOB’s value breaking down data silos, consider these statistics:

• According to IDC, organizations able to analyze all relevant data and deliver actionable information can achieve an extra $430 billion in productivity gains over their less analytically oriented peers.
• A Forrester study found that data-driven companies grow at an average of more than 30% annually.
• McKinsey reports that companies that integrate data across their organization can achieve up to 20% revenue growth.

By enabling organizations to centralize their event data and make it accessible across functions, Axiom's BYOB feature directly contributes to realizing this potential value.

The future of event data

BYOB is only the beginning. Event data has become the majority of data by volume for many organizations. But to extract all of the insights it holds, it needs to be seamlessly integrated as necessary with other sources of data across the entire organization. Standalone observability or log management tools are already becoming obsolete – events are one part of a data foundation that serves all functions.

Rising event volume is a natural outcome of the growth of microservices and cloud-native architectures. Legacy log vendors are trying to handle it with old tech.

Your logging needs an architecture that matches your log sources. One that takes petabytes of events in stride. One that handles them as needed on demand, without strain or expense, to provide a single, solid source of truth that can be tapped by the entire organization and combined with other big data to provide actionable insights.

Axiom is committed to push the boundaries of what's possible with event data, always with an eye towards providing maximum value and flexibility to customers.

Talk to us today

Axiom’s BYOB breaks open SaaS silos today to enable new insights, and serves as an organizational data foundation for the future.

Are you ready to unleash the full potential of your event data? Contact us today at sales@axiom.co for a demo to see how Axiom can transform your data strategy.