SIEM solutions are not dead and remain at the heart of every Security Operations Center (SOC) for detecting, monitoring, and responding to security threats. However, traditional SIEM solutions are dying and it’s evident with recent vendor consolidation activity. Once staples of the market, the likes of LogRhythm and IBMs QRadar are destined to be sunset and their customers coerced into migrating to Palo Alto Networks and Exabeam platforms. Even Splunk, the one time darling of the industry, is floundering in the eyes of customers when CISCO gobbled it up and created drastic cost and complexity barriers that leave security leaders wondering—”what is the future state of their SIEM?”
The emergence of Next-Gen SIEM platforms brings forth modern architectures and advanced Threat Detection, Investigation and Response (TDIR) capabilities to solve modern SecOps challenges. Challenges spanning a deluge of disparate data, manual complexity, visibility limitations and too many false positives that traditional SIEM solutions struggle to address effectively, efficiently and without major cost implications. Many organizations see the benefit of these modern Next-Gen SIEM platforms, but the fear of change due to the entrenched nature of their current SIEM becomes the largest barrier for modernization along budgetary concerns.
Meanwhile, the adversarial landscape is advancing and intensifying due to AI, the democratization of adversarial capabilities and growing IT complexity that leaves gaps ripe for exploitation.
So, on one hand a SIEM replacement is necessary. On the other hand, a SIEM migration feels impossible. What’s a SOC to do?
For starters, you could explore the Gurucul Complimentary SEIM Migration Program—details at the conclusion of the blog. It’s never been more painless and budget friendly to get the most visionary, cost-optimized Next-Gen SIEM.
While the benefits of migrating from a traditional SIEM to more capable Next-Gen SIEM systems are substantial, the process presents unique technical and business challenges that can complicate security operations. Avoiding downtime, maintaining compliance, adhering to budget and maintaining business continuity are fragile endeavors to navigate. These SIEM migration challenges are very real and solving them cannot be oversimplified, but newer platforms do offer technical advantages designed to ease the pain. Don’t let PTSD from legacy SIEM issues over exaggerate what’s possible today.
Here are 4 common SIEM migration challenges, each bearing unique considerations. We’ve outlined the complexity of each and offered a fresh perspective on how they can be addressed.
Data, the lifeline of any SIEM, is mountainous nowadays and introduces quite the dilemma. More data helps derive context, when analyzed properly; but it adds more complexity due to varying sources and formats. SIEM systems often use different log formats and schemas, requiring conversion and normalization of log data during a migration.
Frankly, this data dilemma is the downfall of traditional SIEMs and a key reason for migration. Mass volumes of varying degrees of data sources are resource intensive to normalize and expensive to ingest. Most organizations ignore critical data simply due not being able to afford bringing it in due to the sheer volume.
Next-Gen SIEM solutions offer a glimmer of hope to minimize your migration woes. For starters, the most visionary SIEMs have the ability to ingest any security and non-security data sets and run advanced machine learning analytics to obtain threat context. This means no more critical data left unattended to, but it adds to my ingestion costs right? Not quite, platforms such as Gurucul include a native data optimization module that filters, routes, normalizes and enriches data prior to running analytics—where the $$$ comes in. Filtering out at least 40% of data bloat equates to 40% ingestion savings, allowing ample room to scale and save.
SIEM rules have been vital for SIEM effectiveness and significant time has been invested into developing and maturing those rules. Many of these rules are customized to the organization, its processes and risk posture. Security operations can’t afford to start from scratch, which makes maintaining detection rules a critical consideration for any SIEM migration.
Critical, absolutely. Insurmountable, no.
Modern Next-Gen SIEM platforms are purpose-built to be less rule dependent. They’re fully capable of including rules, but put more weight on data science for better detections. Rules find what you’re looking for, while machine learning and AI go further and find the unknown unknowns. The Gurucul platform has over 3,000 ML detection models that work the moment data is ingested, covering a swatch of the most common use cases. The models are fully customizable from a simple interface, turning analysts into data scientists able to fine-tune detection models to the business.
But yes, you still need to bring over your old rules. The best Next-Gen SIEM providers have utilities to automate translating rules from the traditional SIEM into the newer platform. Boom!
Similar and related to the data migration challenge, SIEM systems bi-directionally integrated with a plethora of security and IT systems. From ingesting Endpoint, Firewall, Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems, and Network data, to triggering response via SOAR and ITSM systems.
Along with Threat Intelligence feeds, these are all common and less challenging integrations. However, it gets more unstable when considering bolted-on UEBA and IAM systems for additional context.
Any cloud-native Next-Gen SIEM worth its salt has simplified integrations and is architected with simple APIs for ease of incorporating new integrations. They also have the added benefit of natively including UEBA and SOAR tools. The best platforms reach far beyond the scope of traditional SIEMs and further extend what is possible in terms of high-fidelity detections, accelerated investigations and automated response.
Why is every SIEM deployment unique? Because every business is unique and hence the uniqueness of every Security Operations Center. When evaluating SIEM solutions you should never ask “how does our process adapt to the tool?” it should be “how does the tool meet or improve our process?” Most SIEM solutions have been curated to meet business demands over many years, manifesting in unique dashboards, reports and response playbooks—all secured with fine-grain Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), hopefully.
Any competent Next-Gen SIEM would come pre-loaded with thousands of purpose-built content covering dashboards, reports and playbooks. However, more critical is how flexible and open these platforms must be in order to make customization seamless. Gurucul for instance ranked 2nd for the SIEM customization use case in the 2024 Gartner SIEM Critical Capabilities report.
Being open and flexible is just 1 of 6 unique design pillars that help position the Gurucul furthest to the right for completeness of vision in the Gartner 2024 SIEM Magic Quadrant. With a unified set of capabilities, the Gurucul REVEAL platform delivers radical clarity into your cyber risk while simultaneously reducing data costs and improving analyst efficiency.
Even considering everything covered so far, a full SIEM migration may still be too much to handle. That’s up to you to decide, but it doesn’t mean you can’t still make significant improvements to your TDIR strategy and reduce SIEM costs. Sometimes starting small and migrating completely overtime is a good decision. If this is where you’re leaning, then I’d urge you to read another one of our blog installments: SIEM Replacement of SIEM Augmentation? How About Both!
Nothing about a SIEM migration is easy, nor would we pretend that is the case. It is however measurably easier than years before and the operational, security and cost benefits of modern Next-Gen SIEM platforms are hard to ignore. To help organizations overcome a fear of change, we’ve decided to lessen the burden of entry even more, with our Free Migration Program.
See what’s included below and/or go here now to get started: https://gurucul.com/complimentary-siem-migration-package—SIEM migration can be done in as little as 4 weeks!
Gurucul’s migration specialists support you at every stage of the process. Our comprehensive services include:
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