Building the future of security with NAB with Lakewatch

It goes without saying that cybersecurity is a critical function for any organization. But for National Australia Bank (NAB), it’s a national responsibility.

As Australia's largest business bank and part of the nation's critical infrastructure, NAB doesn't just protect its own balance sheet when it defends against cyber threats; it protects the financial livelihoods of millions of Australians, and by extension, the broader stability of the Australian economy. That context changes the calculus of everything: the urgency, the stakes and the standard to which their security capabilities must be held.

It's also why we're proud to count NAB as one of our key design partners, helping us build Lakewatch, Databricks’ purpose-built Open Security Lakehouse, and why their perspective is so central to what we're building.

The challenge:

Defending a modern, complex enterprise at scale

The threat landscape facing large financial institutions today is constantly evolving, with teams contending with AI-enabled threats that are faster, more scalable and harder to detect.

Staying in front includes visibility.

"We are threat-informed," explains Sandro Bucchianeri, NAB’s Chief Security Officer. "We work to deeply understand who our adversaries are, understand their tactics and techniques and how they go about targeting organizations, so that we can stay in front of the adversary as much as possible.

NAB ingests more than 30TB of security data each day, a volume that continues to accelerate as digital services expand, third-party integrations increase and threat detection becomes more granular.

Operating at this scale creates a powerful opportunity to unify signals across environments and apply advanced analytics and AI-driven workflows to improve correlation, generate higher-confidence insights and automate response actions at speed.

Why Databricks:

A proven strategic foundation

As NAB's enterprise data platform, Databricks’ relationship with NAB created a natural foundation for the security conversation and the opportunity to find increasingly complex threats by tapping into broader enterprise datasets.

“Our adversaries are increasingly using automation and AI, and our responses need to evolve accordingly,” says Sandro. “We’re looking at how we better mine, analyze and innovate with data, and the Databricks roadmap reflects the kind of forward-looking architecture required to stay ahead”.

Co-innovating Lakewatch:

Real-world SOC expertise meets proven success

Lakewatch is the industry's first Open Security Lakehouse. It evolved from working closely with organizations like NAB, which were attempting to rebuild their security operations on modern data architecture, and recognizing that the market needed a complete, turnkey security operations workflow built natively on the Lakehouse.

NAB is crucial in the development of this new solution.

As one of five design partners, NAB's security team brings operational cyber defense experience in one of the most targeted sectors globally – financial institutions.

Through their deep partnership and unique perspective on security gaps, NAB is helping establish Lakewatch as the open security lakehouse built for the AI-era. Lakewatch enables:

• Advanced analytics and enterprise-wide signal correlation to detect sophisticated threats.
• Proactive threat hunting at scale across high-volume security data.
• AI-enabled cyber defence end-to-end, from ingestion, detection, monitoring, and response.

"The ability to work in collaboration with Databricks to shape a product to meet the needs of cyber defenders into the future is what excites us," says Sandro. "We’re building out a platform that's going to work for us, both in terms of what we've been doing historically and where we think we need to move towards.”

The launch of Lakewatch marks a shift in how organizations defend themselves in the AI era. We’re giving defenders the machine-speed capabilities they need to stay ahead of modern threats. Collaborating with industry leaders like NAB ensures that this platform isn't just technologically advanced, but deeply grounded in real-world operational expertise. — Andrew Krioukov, GM of Lakewatch

The broader impact:

Getting ahead of threats

The benefits of this partnership will extend well beyond NAB's own security needs to the industry at large.

"We see this as an opportunity to contribute to building something special," says Sandro. "Something that capitalizes on the data and AI power of Databricks, with real-life operational cyber defender knowledge and experience in the trenches, helping craft a new, industry-leading capability."

The promise of Lakewatch is a foundational model for security operations designed to meet modern threats. Open, composable, AI-native and built on the same architecture that the world's most data-forward organizations already trust. With design partners like NAB helping shape it from the inside, we're building something the industry genuinely needs.

Learn more If you would like to learn more about Lakewatch, visit our web page.