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Data, information, and knowledge exists in too many different places to ask employees to search them all manually.
New employees don’t know where data is and senior employees waste time searching systems that may not even contain the information they are looking for. Searching through all of this siloed information is not only inefficient, but leads to mistakes from incomplete data or false assumptions.
Federated search enables users to search multiple systems from a single location. By making it faster and easier for users to find what they are looking for, they can focus on the task at hand and yield better outcomes for the organization.
Federated Search in Polarity
When a user searches in Polarity, Polarity federates out that search to all the relevant sources and provides three levels of information.
1. Summary View on all the results
2. Detailed View on any specific result
3. Links back to the original source
4.In one view, users can see all the places there have been results over time across their whole team:
10 Reasons To Choose Polarity as Your Federated Search Platform
Query Language
Legacy federated search systems often require a query language when searching. This can be a barrier to adoption as users need to learn how to search before they can search. Polarity supports searching unstructured free form text and extracts keywords to enable even first time users with no training.
Polarity also supports pre-configuring known complex queries in advance to simplify searches for users. Even the most complex queries are available automatically or at the push of a button reducing friction and enabling consistent information across the entire team.
Data Disparity
Legacy federated search systems often require that data exist in a common structure, schema, or ontology which greatly limits integrations that are possible. Polarity can query different systems with completely different data sets in parallel and fuse the results into a single view.
Data Stays in Place
Sometimes legacy federated search systems still require crawling or indexing to occur before searches have results. With Polarity, data stays where it resides today and it is queried through existing interfaces leveraging indexes already built. This means a faster path to value while saving on storage and optimization costs.
Work Anywhere
Legacy federated search systems often require users to log into a single portal or location. Polarity supports searching at the touch of a keystroke from any application. This allows users to stay focused on the task at hand while empowering them with the most robust federated search possible.
Computer Vision
Legacy federated search systems often require text input. Polarity understands that sometimes work gives you images, pictures, or even virtual machines. Polarity enables you to trigger a search in any application by selecting an area of the screen, even if over a picture or video. Polarity performs real-time optical character recognition to extract the text from the pixels and federate out searches. In the below image, a user triggered a thousand searches by selecting an area on this command line window.
Multidirectional
Legacy federated search systems often only support search, but we live in a world where data submission is often critical as well. Polarity makes it easy to send data to multiple systems for when data capture is important to the task at hand.
Actions
Legacy federated search systems commonly only support viewing or linking to the results of a search. Some missions require fast action with “guard rails” or an easy button. Polarity’s integration framework supports action at the touch of a button. Polarity informs users of available actions and also makes executing them easy. Whether it is opening a ticket or running a playbook, it is often as simple as pressing a button available in the search results. Analysts and operators are presented with the most common, recommended, or critical actions so executing them is near frictionless from wherever the mission takes them.
Integrations and Custom Connectors
Polarity has over 180 “out of the box” integrations and a flexible integration framework that allows anyone to develop an integration quickly and get visibility into any data set. Teams who use Polarity have unprecedented access to the value of their tools.
Not all legacy federated search systems support custom integrations. Sometimes you are locked into the integrations the vendor has built. Polarity makes development of custom integrations easy with the integration framework and over 190 open source integrations built by the Polarity user community.
Configurable Caching
Legacy federated search systems often have caching, but settings are global across all data sets. Polarity recognizes that each data source should have its own cache settings for both information security and usability reasons. Polarity enables shared cache when there are performance or API utilization considerations and private/individual cache when each user has access to different information.
RBAC
Legacy federated search systems do not always support the different access permissions necessary in the modern enterprise environment. Polarity supports full Role Based Access Control (RBAC) rules across a Polarity deployment, ensuring that information is shared with the right people and that the correct permissions are in place. Admins can also choose to give users access to data via Polarity but not to the source tool itself, creating fewer opportunities for unwanted or unnoted changes.
Federated Search Use Cases
Any team that deals with disparate data sources, challenges communicating across knowledge silos, and difficulty getting visibility into their tools’ value is a good candidate for Federated Search. In particular, Polarity specializes in Federated Search for cybersecurity teams: incident response, security operations, threat intelligence, threat hunting, pentesting, and national security.
With Polarity, users get the full capabilities of Federated Search: they are able to make one search to return results from every connected source, including tools, open source data, internal data sets, and knowledge from across the team or organization. With context enrichment coming from every relevant source throughout their workflow, analysts are able to complete their work with both speed and thoroughness, confident that no stone remains unturned after just one search.