Tackling the No. 1 CISO budget item with a SIEM transformation

One of the most prevalent concerns for security leaders is cost – namely, how they can work within their budget and still keep their organization protected. Business leaders understand that security is important, but security leaders are still grappling with how to do more with less.

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is typically the largest budget line-item for a CISO, and it sits at the heart of security operations (SecOps). Some organizations have purchased a wide array of security products, and now they’re struggling to figure out how to reap the value of these tools. While traditional SIEMs have fallen short, a more modern approach can bring major operational benefits for threat detection, investigation and response, and more.

Challenges with SIEMs

Data forms the hub for today’s companies, but research by Forrester highlights the financial challenges involved: the unpredictability of data costs is a struggle for 82% of companies. Rising data ingestion and data transfer fees, worsened by data’s explosive growth, contribute to the problem.

Data parsing and normalization are also costly; data is being produced in an array of sources and formats, and companies are having to spend internal resources figuring out how to normalize the data to bring into their SIEM – or they’re spending money on vendors to do it.

An ongoing issue is the visibility gap: companies still don’t have comprehensive visibility of their environment. Traditional SIEMs don’t have an open and extensible architecture; they will struggle to ingest and scale to meet the data needs of the entire environment, which is the visibility gap. If you can’t see your environment, you can’t see the adversary clearly.

The classic SIEMs of yesteryear were not engineered to deal with the massive volumes of data that exist today. And they certainly were not made to take on all that data in terms of scalability, processing power, reliability or the ability to translate that data into meaningful insights.

Legacy SIEMS also aren’t prepared for hybrid environments and home-based remote work. And they are incapable of dealing with the modern-day adversary using AI. Enterprises may introduce AI into their SIEM, but that’s akin to owning an older car and trying to add new technology to it, like adding an aftermarket backup camera. It might work, but it’s never as good as a native camera built in by the manufacturer. An inconsistent ability to collect information, interpret it and apply analytics to it leads to inconsistent detections and erratic responses. That means you could miss threats that could lead to a costly breach.

Operational benefits of modern SIEMs

With a legacy SIEM, it’s difficult to know where to focus your attention. No one can effectively look at or hire enough people to triage 10,000 or more alerts per day. A modern SIEM can leverage the collection of information and context from any source, regardless of format, which is extremely important. It can make those solutions work together to find out what’s really going on and build up the risk of that story into a case of evidence and context over time, so you know what you should focus on because this is the biggest risk to the business. It’s about bridging the visibility gap, making detection more consistent and easier for the analyst to understand and reducing the complexity of over-tooling.

Any solution or sets of solutions needs the ability to effectively demonstrate how AI is being used and continuously measured against business processes and policies. One major factor that security leaders talk about is their desire to reduce costs in general because they have too many products. They want to improve overall operational efficiency, and machine learning can be used most effectively to improve efficiency and to understand the risk much faster.

A “single pane of glass” solution gathers data management analysis, investigation and response. Solutions like this, empowered by advanced AI and machine learning, provide highly accurate, automatic, real-time threat detection and risk assessment. This eliminates false positives and reduces investigation times by half.

In addition, a unified console like this brings SIEM savings of more than 40% on average when compared against legacy SIEM and bolt-on data processing tools. Essentially, it goes beyond enabling data analytics’ full potential to also offer a manageable way to cost-effectively address the rising challenges of data overwhelm in today’s cybersecurity environment.

The cost-savings factor

Next-generation SIEMs not only address data management and compliance issues but are also budget-friendly. It does this in two major ways. First, the ability to optimize native data gives companies precision control of their security data. This empowers data filtering, normalization and enrichment. That then enables routing to the desired destination, be it a data lake, a SIEM or low-cost cold storage. You don’t have to rehydrate data from external cold storage to bring it into the SIEM, which incurs additional costs. Instead, you can search data and it stays within your ecosystem, reducing costs.

The ability to search across multiple databases, data sources or repositories from a single, unified interface enables analysts to eliminate the visibility gap. It also does away with the cost associated with duplicate data and transfers so that data can stay where it belongs yet remain searchable.

Transform your SIEM

Today’s enterprises know that security is a necessity, but it’s still largely viewed as a cost center. That’s true for traditional SIEMs, which – in addition to creating visibility gaps – introduce data ingestion, complexity and operational efficiency challenges. But AI-powered, next-generation SIEMs are enabling unified security analytics platforms built for big data at scale, with native pipeline management and improved operational efficiency for engineers and analysts. This approach saves time and money on several fronts. Take stock of your current cybersecurity stance to determine whether it’s time for a SIEM upgrade that can become a cost saver.