Partner POV | Solving for Exponential Data Growth in Next-Gen SIEM

This article was written and contributed by our partner, CrowdStrike.

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the number of data sources you manage with your SIEM? How do you piece together different pieces of the puzzle like SOAR, threat intelligence, and security tools for endpoint, cloud, or identity? Do you actually know which tools are strengthening your security posture, and which are just adding more complexity? 

In this post, we share the common challenges SecOps teams face and discuss how the next generation of SIEMs are fundamentally changing how they unlock the potential of their security data.  

Siloed Tools and Data Volumes Burden SecOps Teams

With data volumes on the rise, existing SIEM strategies are becoming unsustainable. Enterprises invest significant time and resources to integrate their SIEM with dozens of tools across their environment, often creating complex and fragmented architectures in efforts to route, replicate, and store data. 

Data silos and long deployment cycles hold teams back from getting the visibility they need to detect, investigate, and respond to threats. It only worsens when data pipelines start to fail with broken parsers, changing log formats, or rules that don't fire. And when legacy SIEMs take hours to execute searches or alerts are delayed, adversaries can break through. 

Adding insult to injury, many CISOs see their legacy SIEMs eat up vast amounts of their security budgets. When teams are understaffed and overworked, the last thing they need is to face hard choices about what data they want to ingest, or risk missing a potential incident. 

Next-Gen SIEMs Come with Key Data Built In  

Next-gen SIEMs take a radically new approach to solve for exponential data growth.

It all starts with getting data in. Unlike their predecessors, the next generation of SIEMs live on the same platform as other security tools including threat intelligence, endpoint, identity, cloud, and more. With a platform approach, key data is consistently structured and available so you can experience sub-second latency and blazing-fast search, even at petabyte scale. 

A platform approach to SIEM also simplifies analyst workflows. Data can be managed and accessed from a single console. No more jumping between tabs. No more endless cycles spent configuring connectors, managing parsers, and dealing with constantly changing log formats from different vendors. Further, next-gen SIEMs make data management cost effective: There's no need to incur incremental ingestion costs when the vast majority of data you need is already in the platform. 

Extending Visibility to Additional Data Sources

But what about data from email security, firewalls, web proxies, and other data sources? 

While next-gen SIEMs drastically simplify management of data sources built into the platform, SecOps teams still often need to augment with external data sources for more visibility.

Next-gen SIEMs streamline this journey with out-of the box connectors and parsers for ready integration across your security ecosystem. More importantly, these solutions are continuously gaining new capabilities to help you evolve with the rapidly changing threat landscape. 

Here are a few of the latest developments we've released for our own CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM:

• AI-Generated Parsers: Save hours of manual work reading documentation from all of your different log sources. Simply point your sample logs into our platform and automatically create or modify a parser to make your third-party data readily available for analysis.
• CrowdStream: Access Cribl's streaming, filtering, and routing capabilities directly from the Falcon Next-Gen SIEM console.
• Falcon Log Collector: Easily collect and forward data from a variety of sources using a lightweight, flexible software application. The Falcon Log Collector seamlessly integrates with Falcon Next-Gen SIEM to ensure logs from disparate systems are ingested and analyzed in a centralized location.

Falcon Next-Gen SIEM has helped major organizations accelerate and improve their data ingestion capabilities: "We're on the precipice of another major leap with Falcon Next-Gen SIEM," said Steve McIntosh, Director of Threat Management and Response at Aflac. "It's at least ten times faster than what we had before. The performance improvements have been game-changing, allowing us to instantly ingest Falcon platform data and third-party data for the ultimate visibility and threat hunting. We've had a lot of success pulling our data together." 

Tailored Services Ensure SIEM Success

Most legacy SIEMs require SecOps teams to have vast amounts of expertise and experience to onboard data, or else relegate this critical step to subpar service providers. Often, security teams may suffer from a lengthy, tedious migration experience because they work with a services team that simply tries to lift and shift all of the logic and historical data from their existing implementation. But like any data problem, the outcomes you achieve depend on the quality of the inputs. 

Next-gen SIEMs are often complemented by dedicated service teams that both support SIEM migration and overall security data strategy. These teams should work with you to understand your detections and investigation processes, and to identify and prioritize onboarding the data you actually need. As you evaluate solutions providers, look for a deep bench specializing in SIEM and adversary tradecraft. Some next-gen SIEMs also boast partnerships with global systems integrators (GSIs) that build service offerings and SOC transformation practices on top of their solution.

Bringing It All Together

SIEM can be complex, but with a truly next-gen solution, you won't need to spend countless cycles on data onboarding. The majority of data you need lives on the same platform, meaning silos and runaway logging bills are a thing of the past. Ultimately, next-gen SIEMs allow you to unlock the value of your data faster for more effective and efficient threat detection, investigation, and response.