Say Goodbye to Tradition SIEM and Welcome to Data Lake
Average corporate security organization on average spends $18 million annually on corporate security. However, it is largely ineffective in preventing breaches, IP theft and data loss. Any guesses why? It is because malware and cyber threats evolve faster than data security tools.
The cyber security landscape is constantly evolving, faster than you can ever think. The solutions providers are striving to address data management and cyber security challenges with simple and user-friendly solutions. SIEM data lake or security data lake, which is currently the buzzword in the cyber security world is one such solution.
Centralizing data has emerged as a great challenge in modern security programs as data continues to grow and evolve in size, shape and format. SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) vendors are trying to offer their customers cloud-like agility and ease of access in SIEM software solutions. As a result, SIEM Data Lake (SDL) solution is born.
How is SIEM data lake different from traditional SIEM solutions?
Data is not just growing in volumes. It is also growing in complexity and dimensionality. Additionally, there are countless monitoring platforms and devices in an IT environment. Traditional SIEM software solutions can analyse petabytes of data in on-premises infrastructure. However, it falls short when it comes to analysing exabytes of logs, events and constantly growing data in hybrid cloud environments.
To ensure cyber security, SOCs today needs rapid access to data. But the velocity and variability of data sets are so enormous that they can overwhelm the analyst. It requires a fresh approach to address this issue.
A SIEM data lake is a centralized repository that can maintain and manage logs and data sources that are important for the organization’s cyber security. Just like a data lake with a huge appetite for data ingestion, SIEM data lake too can ingest data from a plethora of sources and integrate it with security analytics tools. As a result, what you get is a single place where security data can be stored, searched and utilized.
Learn more: What is SIEM?
Why do you need a SIEM data lake?
The data deluge is a huge problem. Every single day, organizations generate an enormous amount of fresh data. If left unmonitored, it can pose a cyber threat to the organization’s data security. Traditional SIEMs are not designed to handle data of this scale. As a result, security teams struggle to derive insights from the available data.
SIEM data lake is a SIEM platform that centralizes data from on-premise, cloud and SaaS environments. This helps analysts in detecting threats in a constantly growing IT environment and responding to sophisticated attackers.
Traditional SIEM challenges
Limited focus
In today’s evolving cyber security landscape, focusing just on a collection of security events is not sufficient. It needs to focus on additional information like open-source intelligence information, consumable external threat feeds, malware, IP reputation databases, and even dark web activities. Traditional SIEM architecture cannot capture all these activities.
Enormous cost
Traditional SIEM requires tremendous physical and virtual infrastructure to deal with the data deluge. The cost of data explosion, hardware and license are too much for a small-scale organization. Even after spending huge amounts on cyber security, the results are dissatisfactory in most cases. A survey conducted by Ponemon Institute suggested that more than half of the IT leaders did not even know if the cyber security tools are working or not.
How SIEM Data Lake overcomes these challenges
The strength of the data lake is that it is agile, dynamic and capable of supporting unstructured and semi-structured data in its native format. It can store log files, feeds, tables, text files and system logs in their original format. What’s more, it is cost-effective and easily accessible. All these make SIEM data lake an attractive option for the SOC team.
Key benefits
SIEM data lake empowers the SOC team in many ways. Rather than data management and searching for the required data, the team can focus more on strategic activities. Here are some key benefits of the SIEM data lake.
More sophisticated threat hunting
Cyber threats are getting more sophisticated than ever. They strike in new forms and formats every few days. SIEM data lake can trigger suspicious IP or events, keeping pace with the constantly evolving IT environment. It facilitates security teams in following a trigger, finding the attacker and remediating the attempt before it can disrupt the system.
Due to huge log storage capacity, SIEM data lake can cross-refer and connect the dots just like an expert and intuitive security analyst.
Informed decision-making
A cyber threat can disrupt the entire digital ecosystem within no time. Therefore, once detected, one must perform an investigation and take necessary actions without wasting a moment. SIEM data lake offers seamless access to all security-related data, replacing the time-consuming log collection process. The analysts can gain insights into historical trends and even datasets as old as 10 years. This is hardly possible with a traditional SIEM.
In SIEM data lake, data processing is automated. Therefore, the security team can divert their energies towards more skilful tasks such as strategizing, preventing or stopping the cyberattack. Also, huge storage for security logs provides insights into the patterns of anomaly. It helps the security team in planning powerful defence mechanisms to avoid repeated attacks.
Comprehensive data collection and analysis
SIEM data lake enables the security teams to search from a wide variety of data. Once normalized in a property format, the data can be used effectively for threat detection and investigation. The user can collect and analyse logs from myriad data sources including the servers, event logs, SaaS applications, cloud resources to gain comprehensive visibility across the IT environment of the organization.
Dynamic scalability
Organizations generate huge amounts of data every day. SIEM data lake is a dynamic solution that can match up with the rapidly growing cloud-scale data demands. The security team can start small and expand as per the data security requirements. They can surf through petabytes of data, and get the desired information within seconds or minutes which earlier used to take hours, and sometimes weeks.
Data enrichment
Effective threat detection and quick incident response largely rely upon data enrichment. SIEM data lake solution can provide event and non-event contextual information such as identity context, vulnerability context and business context. Eliminating unnecessary noise, it only highlights alerts that need analysts’ attention. Thus, SIEM data lake help analyst prioritize and combat high-risk threats.
Cost-effective
Till now, the storage of security data has been a costly affair. It is one of the reasons many organizations steer away from SIEM. SIEM data lake is a way more cost-effective solution than traditional SIEM solutions. It smartly allocates right-sized resources for workloads to save costs and resources.
Intuitive and intelligent
Data lake technology can coalesce data into proper formats. These mechanisms can be further used to derive intelligence in the form of fact tables which is a great time-saver during threat investigation. It enables the admin to directly go to the desired fact table, saving time and effort.
Learn more: What is Data Lake? Definition, Benefits and More
SIEM is a great concept on its own, and data lake is even a greater IT breakthrough. Merging both, organizations can boost their data security multifold.
