Data Doesn’t Save Missions. Insight Does.

Introducing Cyera’s DataPort: how we’re using MCP to advance decision performance

It’s 21:08 CST on April 13, 1970. Suddenly, crisis strikes! An oxygen tank on the Apollo 13 spacecraft explodes, throwing Astronauts Lovell, Swigert, and Haise into danger. As their oxygen depletes, Mission Control Houston faces its own challenge; raw telemetry data spews from Apollo’s failing systems. With life support and electrical systems hanging by a thread, the ground team begins rapidly interpreting the massive influx of data, as well as extracting new telemetry from inactive systems, to identify root cause and devise a fix.

Sy Liebergot, the EECOM (Electrical, Environmental, and Consumables Manager) flight controller responsible for Apollo’s Command Module’s systems, likened the data challenge to “read[ing] a book where all the pages had been shuffled randomly.” The myriad warning lights and data made little sense. After rapid system triage, human ingenuity and real-time problem-solving, Ed Smylie’s jerry-built scrubber of cardboard, plastic bags and duct tape cuts through the analytical chaos to save mission and crew. 

The Apollo 13 crisis is perhaps the nth degree of decision challenges brought about by large, complex data. But technology executives and practitioners encounter this challenge routinely. Security professionals particularly are forced to collate diverse, complex data sets across stacks to execute decisions at high tempo; many with tangled interdependencies, all incurring cost-benefit trade-offs. Without the computational power to sift data at pace and scale coupled with the intelligence to enrich it, practitioners are left grappling with gut and subjectivity for their decisions.

And every decision comes at a price:

• How much OpEx is incurred from time-to-decide (TTD)? 
• What’s the true opportunity return on a data or security control decision?
• What’s the cost fallout of the wrong control decision?

As the AI-Native Data Security Platform (DSP), we became obsessed with solving this problem. Cyera’s ability to decode and enrich data DNA enabled us to become the natural gateway to decision insight: the product Sy and his team needed but didn’t have. 

Having operated as a Global CISO across heavily-regulated, acquisitive and high-growth environments, I knew success would be defined in the efficacy of the decisions my teams and I made. This is why I never fell in love with what a product did but why it did it: optimizing the decision outcome was everything. 

Before joining Cyera, I spent months working with my Data Analyst for Information Security to automate the centralized, repeatable reporting of data stories & insights that helped me reduce loss exposure, improve performance efficiency and create growth opportunity. It brought my CDO and I into lockstep as we built out a data mesh, leveraging system integrations to build everything from automated control workflows to enterprise-level data stories for ExCo & Boards. 

Now Cyera is bringing this capability to market. A direct interface into clean, analytics-ready datasets based on your Cyera data. DataPort empowers customers to augment their data with other integrated sets (e.g. CrowdStrike, Okta) to build custom dashboards, data products, and automations at scale. Operating at the intersection between data and security, DataPort integrates metadata into your security data lakes, catalogs, and warehouses to provide mission-critical insights that optimize decision-making. 

But this is only the beginning. 

Organizations are in a brave new world, one defined by scale, speed, and autonomy. Human-machine synergy has taken root. Exponential data growth is fueling the agent economy, as agentic AI becomes the analytical force multiplier for decision support, moving autonomously to crunch, correlate and calculate data at unprecedented speed and scale. Securing this activity will be the deciding factor for organizations to move with less haste and more speed. 

This is why we’re releasing MCP, empowering customers and their agentic workforce to interact directly with their Cyera data, unlocking its full exploit of limitation for security decision-making. 

Decision layers will compress. Execution frequency (and precision) will increase. For executives, practitioners and agents alike, time-to-insight will drop as intelligence augments. Everything from configuration change to revenue intelligence analysis will get faster and more accurate on an unforeseen scale. This paradigm shift in decision democratisation means the winners in data security will be those who enable their identities to think, decide, and act in runtime, not visualize after the fact. With MCP, Cyera is making this a reality. 

55 yrs ago, Sy’s team showed humans are capable of effective decision making under extreme pressure: isolating data that mattered and acting immediately. But half a century on, the demand for accurate, meaningful decisions to be undertaken at cosmic velocity is outstripping human ability. Hyperscale pattern recognition, task compartmentalization, real-world scenario analysis etc. belongs to our agentic friends. Data & security teams have no choice but to adapt.

This is why DataPort is the guidance system every organization needs to navigate the dataverse and save their mission.

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