Organizations are progressively adopting pure cloud and cloud focused hybrid Information Technology models when executing Digital Transformation initiatives and migrating their infrastructure to the cloud to achieve critical business objectives and needs. This shift to cloud and SaaS platforms, along with more remote workers, has increased the traditional enterprises' attack surface exponentially- leaving more security blind spots and vulnerabilities than ever before.
This massive digitalization, combined with the complexity of hybrid environments, makes it difficult for organizations to effectively integrate robust security monitoring into legacy infrastructure.
In theory, organizations employ a security information and event management (SIEM) solution to consolidate and correlate all of this information, however, in practice, traditional SIEMs buckle under large data volumes and the modern threat landscape. To adapt, many organizations are turning to a cloud-native SIEM solution.
Cloud-Native SIEM: How Is It Different?
A cloud-native SIEM is designed for the modern world and threats, acting in perfect synchronicity with cloud architecture, hybrid, and on-premise parts of an IT environment. This offers organizations unparalleled flexibility, especially when managing modern threats in hybrid environments.
At a time when workforces and critical workloads have expanded beyond predictable locations, threat surfaces have grown beyond the monitoring and storage capabilities of traditional on-premise SIEM technologies.
Cloud-native SIEM technologies, however, offer organizations an effective and efficient way to connect and monitor all of their technology—devices, servers, applications, users, and infrastructure components in the cloud, data centers, and hosting centers.
Additionally, while a traditional SIEM solution is often bottlenecked by processing power, a cloud-native solution offers more flexibility in terms of speed and scale. Organizations can customize and build more advanced analytics according to their needs; this allows them to receive data and investigate threats in real-time, as well as quickly, accurately, and retroactively hunt for threats using high confidence threat intelligence.
3 Must-Haves of a Transformative Cloud-Native SIEM
Scale
Great cyber security is predicated on having the right data available to detect threats. The exponential surge of data in modern times is a significant challenge for security operations centers. While a large environment 15 years ago may have had thousands of events per second (EPS), it’s not uncommon to see environments today with hundreds of thousands and more EPS- pushing into daily terabyte telemetry volumes.
Additionally, increased digitalization and IT infrastructure has pushed log volumes past traditional storage boundaries. This influx of data has then been exacerbated by longer retention periods, and not merely for compliance. Breaches are often discovered 200-300 days after the initial compromise, which means organizations must retain data logs longer to properly retrospectively investigate and respond. This creates a challenge- massive amounts of data must be constantly searched to find these indicators of compromise.
Together, the massive amount of data and the extended periods needed to retain them are proving too overwhelming and too expensive for legacy systems. For a truly effective cloud-native SIEM, it must be able to handle petabytes of data— while remaining cost effective.
Speed
With more logs to search and alerts to confirm, the right cloud-native SIEM solution should unify and enrich all security telemetry onto a single timeline, adding value to the security narrative and building a contextualized story so that you can effectively get ahead of every threat.
Alert fatigue is one of the biggest challenges for cybersecurity teams. Cutting through the noise and confirming that an alert truly needs analyst intervention continues to be a SOC challenge. Worse, still, is alert triage; security teams often don’t know which alerts to prioritize, leaving significant delays in responses to critical threats where every second counts.
Modern security systems are only effective if they make it easier for analysts to move beyond triage to intelligent analysis of data. This requires powerful query tools which operate at speed to deliver meaningful results, especially in threat hunting activities which require analysis of massive amounts of data collected months or years prior to the search. This additional context should empower security teams with actionable threat information in seconds or minutes—not hours or days.
Coverage
While it’s clear that modern security analytics should use a cloud backend, it doesn’t mean that it should just protect your assets deployed in the cloud. Most organizations today use a hybrid model, so the ideal security solution would be one that’s deployed in the cloud but also able to analyze telemetry from cloud and on-premise sources, modern and legacy tools, as well as systems and applications for a wide range of security use cases.
Meet the New Standard for Security Monitoring
For modern organizations, a cloud-native SIEM that covers all the critical aspects—scale, speed, and coverage—is the only way that they can stay ahead of the challenges presented by their growing threat surface. Evolving cybersecurity threats are continuously proving that speed is paramount, and SIEM solutions deliver value if they are able to quickly gather data, provide meaningful context, and notify a security team in time for them to respond.
With that in mind, we have partnered with Google Cloud to bring you one of the most powerful SIEM solutions in the cybersecurity market— CyGuard® Cloud SIEM powered by Google Chronicle.
With a large library of over 330 data sources, strong telemetry via our platforms, and embedded Harbinger and Google threat intelligence, your organization will be empowered to efficiently process petabytes of data and quickly identify security threats.
Our security fabric, CyGuard Maestro™, connects to your environment, enriching and contextualizing alerts generated by CyGuard® Cloud SIEM, so that you can effectively cut through the noise of your environment and Get There First™- every time.
The security capabilities of Google Chronicle combined with our CyGuard Maestro™ platform and 24x7x365 security operations experts, allows for unprecedented investigation, protection, and response against cyber threats in the modern threat landscape.
Key features of CyGuard® Cloud SIEM powered by Google Chronicle
As a new kind of MSSP, Digital Hands is how organizations are getting ahead of the bad guys in a world where compliance alone is no guarantee of protection. Too many companies invest in cybersecurity solutions, follow the recommendations, achieve compliance … and then still get breached. You’ve got to get to your exposures before the bad guys do.