Connectors: bringing your data in without opening your network
Your messages live in mailboxes, chat tools and ticketing systems. Getting them into Howzer should not require a firewall exception, and it should not mean a copy of your data sitting on a vendor server.
By Howzer Team, Engineering ·
Most analysis tools solve the ingest problem the easy way: send us your data. That is a reasonable design and an impossible conversation to have with a security team in a regulated industry. So we inverted it.
The usual way
- Your data is sent to the vendor
- Outbound firewall rules required
- The vendor holds the encryption keys
- Where data lives is the vendor decision
How Howzer does it
- Connectors run inside your own network
- No outbound traffic by default
- You hold the encryption keys
- Data never leaves your network
What a connector actually is
A small service that runs next to Howzer on your own infrastructure. It signs in to your source system with credentials you issue and can revoke, and it collects messages either on a schedule or as they arrive. It talks to Howzer over your internal network and to nothing else.
The path a message takes
What you can connect
- Shared mailboxes, either directly or through Microsoft 365.
- Ticketing systems, by polling or by having them notify us.
- Chat platforms, as messages arrive.
- Anything else, through a documented interface you can build against.
If a source genuinely lives outside your network, that one destination is allow-listed explicitly and signed off during setup. It is the exception, never the default.