Ep 20 - One Solution, Infinite Value: How SecurityScorecard Put Confluent at the Center of Everything

What happens when a security intelligence company decides that data contracts aren't optional, they're the foundation? For SecurityScorecard, that decision changed everything: how teams share data, how pipelines are built, and how quickly a new engineer can ship production-grade work on day one.

In this episode, Brandon Brown, Senior Engineering Manager, and Manan Monga, Senior Software Engineer at SecurityScorecard, join host Joseph Morais to walk through their multi-year journey from batch snapshots and MSK to a fully schema-governed, event-driven platform on Confluent Cloud. They cover how Protobuf and Schema Registry became the organization's shared language for data, how Apache Flink® pipelines now power real-time CVE enrichment across 12 Kafka topics, and how Kafka became the undisputed single source of truth for data across teams.

You'll Learn:

• How SecurityScorecard used schema-first design and Protobuf to eliminate downstream data drift and reduce processing time from days to near real-time
• Why shifting data logic left—into Kafka and Flink—freed downstream consumers from replicating brittle query logic and reduced cross-team dependencies
• How Confluent Cloud's managed infrastructure, Terraform provider, and Schema Registry gave a lean engineering team the operational leverage to focus on product, not plumbing

About the Guests: 
Brandon Brown, Senior Engineering Manager Engineer, Scoring SecurityScorecard – Brandon Brown is a Senior Engineering Manager at SecurityScorecard where he leads the team who provide the scores at the core of our ratings platform. These scores guide cybersecurity leaders worldwide in reducing their risk and addressing risk in their vendors. His team also drives secure data sharing and advances company-wide adoption of streaming technologies.

With 10+ years of experience in software development, Brandon has experience across the full SDLC specializing in Data Pipelines over the last 8+ years. His language of choice is Scala but he has a soft spot for SQL. He’s contributed to top open source projects such as Debezium and was an early contributor to the ZIO ecosystem. He’s passionate about Kafka and Hybrid Data Pipeline strategies. Outside of work he’s helping raise his young son and catching live music or talking about movies.

Manan Monga is Senior Software Engineer at SecurityScorecard, building real-time pipelines that stream threat intelligence into the SCDR platform. With experience in SIEM, cloud security, and distributed systems, along with an MS in Computer Science and Cybersecurity from Boston University, he's passionate about performant data at scale. Java is his go-to, but Kafka has his heart. When he's not optimizing pipelines, he's reading sci-fi, cooking, or out cruising in his convertible.

Guest Highlight:
"It was like a weekend to process one day, and that was if the Scala service didn't die while it was running… friends don't let friends ignore schemas. Schemas all the way down." — Brandon Brown, SecurityScorecard

Chapters:
[00:50] Guest Introduction + SecurityScoreCard Overview 
[07:00] Segment 1: Data Streaming Goodness
[23:20] Segment 2: Beyond the Stream 
[42:40] Segment 3: Quick Bytes
[45:20] Segment 4: Joseph’s Top Takeaways

Dive Deeper into Data Streaming:

• EP1—Stream On: Unleashing Innovation With Data Streaming | Life Is But A Stream
• EP2—Processing Without Pause: Continuous Stream Processing and Apache Flink® | Life Is But A Stream
• EP3—The Connective Tissue: Shift Left to Turn Data Chaos to Clarity | Life Is But A Stream

Links & Resources:

• Connect with Joseph: @thedatagiant
• Joseph’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/thedatagiant
• Brandon’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandon-brown-8529681b/
• Manan’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manan-monga/
• The Ultimate Data Streaming Guide - Second Edition: https://www.confluent.io/resources/ebook/streaming-use-case-guide/?utm_campaign=tm.fm-ww_cd.2026-usecase-book-podcast-nbas&utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=podcast  

Our Sponsor:  
Your data shouldn’t be a problem to manage. It should be your superpower. The Confluent data streaming platform transforms organizations with trustworthy, real-time data that seamlessly spans your entire environment and powers innovation across every use case. Create smarter, deploy faster, and maximize efficiency with a true data streaming platform from the pioneers in data streaming. Learn more at confluent.io.

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