The Reveal Platform
According to the Hashicorp “State of the Cloud” for 2023 survey report, 90% of large enterprises have adopted multi-cloud infrastructure, with 76% of organizations worldwide using multi-cloud setups. These distributed environments amplify the need for advanced federated search software that enables organizations to overcome challenges like visibility gaps, regulatory restrictions, and operational complexity. Enterprises must often manage infrastructure across regions for disaster recovery and data sovereignty compliance, which complicates Security Operations Center (SOC) operations, particularly with SIEM and XDR solutions.
With applications and data hosted across multiple clouds, regions, and data centers make achieving consolidated visibility challenging. Without federated search software, organizations struggle to unify their threat detection efforts, investigate security issues, and determine appropriate responses across these fragmented environments.
Requirements by specific countries and regions often forbid certain data to be moved from the local environment. For example, GDPR restrictions may prevent data from being exported out of the region or host country.
To overcome these hurdles, organizations often attempt to deploy a SIEM solution in each cloud and region. This is the primary mechanism that current SIEMs use to respect data sovereignty regulations. However, this means that the SIEM solution must be deployable within each cloud provider. The challenge is that while many SIEMs can ingest data from different cloud providers, they are usually tied to one primary cloud vendor in terms of deployment. In addition, even if the SIEM does support more than one provider, the security team must be trained to operate and actively manage each SIEM in each distinct cloud environment. That requires extensive training and certifications to accomplish.
Moving large data sets across clouds to combine and analyze data often leads to significant costs in transferring or making copies of data. Large-scale data transfers can also lead to greater risk and exposure for data loss or theft. Just as data can be spread across cloud providers, threats can also be spread across multiple providers. For security teams looking for threats, they need to see a consolidated view across the entire set of federated infrastructure. However, to consolidate the telemetry, the transfer costs charged by cloud providers when moving data from one to another cloud provider can escalate costs rapidly. In addition, some of the data being transferred may also end up replicated across multiple storage services, adding even more to the total cost of the solution.
The need to keep data distributed and the ability to deal with multiple silo requirements push SIEM deployments to a distributed model, and this is where a federated SIEM model shows its advantages.
These challenges have reduced the reliability and scalability of most SOC solutions today. Part of the problem for security vendors is that their fundamental architectures must be completely rebuilt to support the one capability that can significantly improve cloud observability and threat detection accuracy across today’s enterprise cloud architectures, Federated SIEM. Federated SIEM can allow security teams to bridge the data silos, retain data for analysis locally, and investigate across toolsets that reside in their cloud, SaaS, and on-premises environments.
At the core of a “Federated” SIEM is the ability to perform federated search. A single search request spans all data sources across security technologies, cloud environments, data stored in Amazon S3 buckets, Active Directory, cloud-hosted human resource systems, hypervisors, Windows event logs, etc.
A federated search retrieves information from across vendor solutions and environments. It uses API integrations with third parties to perform a unified search across the data sources that are participating in the federation, and it does this without requiring cross-cloud or restricted region data transfers to a centralized SIEM. This prevents having to pivot and manually login to many different applications to collect data, apply security analytics and power investigations.
Gurucul Next Generation SIEM has been architected to provide the necessary security analysis required for the detection of threats and other cloud security problems regionally, while still reducing the amount of data that must be centralized to fully identify attacks that target cloud resources. Gurucul does this by applying another layer of threat chaining and risk analysis to better validate and prioritize attack campaigns beyond just individual events from applications, virtual network constructs, and compute resources.
With Gurucul’s purpose-built cloud-native architecture, the platform is fully deployable and certified with multiple cloud providers including AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCP, Cloudflare, and several others. In addition, Gurucul supports the following:
To discuss how Gurucul can improve the reliability and scalability of your security operations as you migrate to more complex cloud architectures, talk to one of our Next-Gen SIEM experts.
