VicOne Steers the Automotive Industry Towards Faster Security Protection with AWS

VicOne, a subsidiary of cloud and enterprise cybersecurity company Trend Micro, was launched in 2022 to develop automotive cybersecurity solutions. As vehicles increasingly resemble computers on wheels and connect with external systems, they are more vulnerable to cyber threats and unauthorized access.

VicOne's cybersecurity solutions safeguard connected vehicles throughout their life cycles. These solutions visualize and analyze attacks across multiple layers, including electronic control units, to understand the context, identify relationships, and assess the impact. VicOne's cloud-based xNexus platform consolidates cross-data sources, allowing automotive manufacturers' VSOC teams to investigate and respond to attacks efficiently.

The business aimed to improve sales and set xNexus apart by allowing swifter data integration. In the automotive industry, the extended proof of concept (POC) stages, which usually involve months of database schema standardization and data integration, can create resource challenges for both the company and its customers. William Chang, senior manager of cloud services at VicOne, explains, “Normalizing customer vehicle data schemas can take up to seventy percent of our data engineering time. We wanted to bring that figure down to accelerate the POC process.”

From the start of the project, VicOne knew it wanted to work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to minimize integration efforts and speed up timelines. “With AWS, we knew our collaborations with automotive manufacturers would be effortless, secure, and fast,” says Chang.

Initially, VicOne used AWS Lambda serverless functions to direct vehicle and manufacturer database data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets for data exchange and schema normalization. However, upon the release of AWS IoT FleetWise, VicOne began leveraging this component to ingest vehicle data and store it in a purpose-built Amazon Timestream database. “Our data analysis engine can extract vehicle data directly from Amazon Timestream, helping us complete schema normalization around 70 percent faster,” states Chang.

In addition to reducing workloads, AWS IoT FleetWise can transfer vehicle data at scale, easily handling over one billion logs per day. These logs are analyzed by VicOne's proprietary Kubernetes-based applications, which are managed by Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). For VSOC teams, this scalability is essential, as Chang elaborates: “By analyzing large amounts of data in real time, VSOC teams can identify anomalies and potential security threats. Once a threat is identified, team members can collect additional data through AWS IoT FleetWise to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the situation. This capability is particularly valuable in today's rapidly evolving threat landscape, where the ability to respond quickly and effectively can mean the difference between a minor incident and a major security breach.”

With AWS IoT FleetWise, VicOne can initiate POCs 50 percent faster, which in turn lowers costs. Chang adds, “AWS IoT FleetWise also allows us analyze data much faster than before, reducing the time it takes to see results by up to 70 percent. This speed and agility are critical in fast-paced business environments, where companies need to respond quickly to changing market conditions and customer needs.”