In today’s rapidly changing cybersecurity market it’s more important than ever to choose the right SIEM. You need a SIEM that can improve your security operations efficiency with better visibility, high-fidelity real-time threat detections, and automated response to reduce dwell time. Rule-based SIEM solutions, like Splunk Enterprise and other legacy SIEMs, were built to collect, correlate and search which was sufficient for log management and compliance. But many enterprises have been discontented with Splunk Enterprise because it provides limited value against detecting today’s complex and sophisticated threats.
Today’s threats require a high-fidelity SIEM that harnesses the power of machine learning, behavior analytics, and artificial intelligence. Gurucul Next-Gen SIEM combines SIEM, UEBA, SOAR and Identity & Access Analytics into a unified platform. This blog discusses Gurucul vs Splunk in the context of the Cisco acquisition of Splunk, the current SIEM landscape, and what organizations truly need to defend against today’s advanced cyber threats.
The recent news that Splunk is to be acquired by Cisco creates uncertainty. While it plays out over the next year, Splunk is unlikely to invest in their product, customer support or channel program. Many customers are already dissatisfied with their maxed-out Splunk SIEM. They struggle with inflexible and costly data ingestion, endless rule writing, and weak, black-box threat detections. These issues are likely to get worse as the acquisition drags. There’s no promise of improvement under a Cisco regime. Cisco, a network company at its core, has a shaky track record of elegantly integrating companies into their portfolio – Webex and AppDynamics are good examples. Once market leaders, both have declined dramatically. There is no reason for customers to wallow in the uncertainty. They can take steps now to migrate away from Splunk.
The good news is you don’t have to deal with the uncertainty. If your Splunk Enterprise SIEM is already maxed out and underperforming, why wait to see if things will get better in a year after the acquisition plays itself out? We know change is hard, but it doesn’t have to be. We’ll buy back up to 12 months of your existing contract so you can keep your Splunk SIEM up and running while you ease into the transition at no extra cost to you. We believe the decision between Gurucul vs Splunk should be an easy one.
Here are 7 ways that explain why you should consider Gurucul vs Splunk. It’s not rocket science, it’s data science!
Splunk Enterprise has incomplete visibility. Limited support for many security sources hampers visibility and detection leaving gaps in analyzing telemetry for things like cloud, SaaS and other challenging and unique data structures. Onboarding and parsing data in Splunk Enterprise is difficult and slow – and off-loaded to third parties. This makes it difficult to migrate from on-prem to the cloud. As a Splunk alternative, Gurucul Next-Gen SIEM works with Any Data, Any Source, Any Cloud. With pre-packaged data pipelines, support for traditional log data, and real-time APIs with over 450 pre-built integrations all necessary and relevant data is quickly ingested into the platform.
Splunk Enterprise has static correlation rules and a half-baked UEBA bolted-on deliver low fidelity detections and a high volume of false positives. With Gurucul’s 2,500+ customizable Machine Learning models you can chain together identity, behavioral activity, security alerts and threat intelligence to quickly detect and respond to known and unknown threats. And with Gurucul STUDIO, this Splunk alternative lets you can modify or create new models on your own – no data scientist needed.
A legacy SIEM solution like Splunk Enterprise causes alert fatigue. SOC teams struggle to know what to prioritize and are unable to investigate everything due to the sheer volume of alerts generated by Splunk’s rule-based SIEM. Gurucul Next-Gen SIEM moves past static rule-based correlation models alone with Machine Learning-powered analytics and OOTB threat content to provide real-time accurate detections that are prioritized by a customizable and dynamic risk framework aligned to enterprise needs.
Splunk Enterprise leads to lengthy investigations. With Splunk, you must know XML, HTML, JavaScript, etc. to create a search query. Lacking confidence in detections from a high percentage of false positives and having limited context, SOC analysts must “swivel chair” to multiple systems to gather evidence. This increases the time spent verifying if an alert is a real threat. Gurucul Next-Gen SIEM is a Splunk alternative that enables analysts with AI assisted threat hunting and provides a definitive case of evidence with full context to expedite investigations.
Splunk Enterprise suffers from the combination of too many alerts, high false positive rates and investigations that take too long. This impacts the ability to respond quickly, increasing your MTTR KPI. Gurucul Next-Gen SIEM provides high-fidelity detections prioritized by risk and full context, and you can respond with confidence using dynamically built and customizable playbooks.
Splunk Enterprise wasn’t architected for today’s hybrid, multi-cloud and decentralized architectures which leads to poor reliability as more applications and infrastructure move to the cloud. Gurucul Next-Gen SIEM is purpose-built as a cloud-native SaaS solution that supports hybrid-cloud as well as on-prem and provides multi-cloud analytics for advanced threats.
Onboarding new data with Splunk Enterprise is expensive due to volume-based pricing spikes, soft implementation costs and increased compute requirements. Gurucul’s flexible pricing models, open architecture and simplified data ingestion allow you to predict costs, alleviate the need for 3rd party integration expenses and preserve your team’s time for more impactful threat prevention work. Gurucul vs Splunk? It’s a no brainer!
Gurucul is focused on customer success. We pride ourselves on continuing to meet and exceed customer satisfaction metrics. We recently talked with a couple of our customers about the value they are getting from Gurucul Next-Gen SIEM. Hear directly from our gratified customers regarding their experience with the Gurucul high-fidelity SIEM solution:
“There are a lot of big players in the SIEM space, and many will tell you they are the only solution you should use. But as someone who works in sequential machine learning and data-driven analytics, I can tell you that this is the future of understanding what is happening in your organization. You really should look at the Gurucul technology that comes from a great group of people, and at a decent price. I recommend Gurucul to my peers and my friends.”
– Bob Vail, CISO, Citrine Informatics
“The Gurucul platform leverages a variety of machine learning and AI models that our analysts can put to use with relative ease. It already has various use cases that utilize the machine learning models, but we also have the ability to train the models ourselves. That’s very important to adapt the models to our own unique use cases. We find this drastically compresses the time needed for investigations.”
– Mathan Babu Kasilingham, Chief Technology Security Officer & Data Privacy Officer, Vodafone Idea Limited
Need more evidence to point you to Gurucul vs Splunk? How about technology integrations? It’s critically important for a next generation SIEM to be able to ingest all your data feeds quickly and easily. It’s also important to have deep, bi-directional integrations with your primary infrastructure providers like Microsoft, Google, and AWS.
Gurucul has deep technology integrations with many of the world’s leading technology providers to deliver integrated and optimized solutions to solve our customer’s complex business needs.
In addition, Gurucul Next-Gen SIEM supports over 450 technology integrations out-of-the-box. New connectors can easily be built using the Gurucul flex connector framework.
Any enterprise that is subject to compliance or industry regulations have a need for a Splunk alternative. Also, any industry that has critical data, such as intellectual property, PII, HIPAA, and customer data. Some of the top industries for a Splunk replacement are: Financial & Banking, Manufacturing, e-Commerce, Healthcare, Software or High-Tech, and Retail just to name a few.
Gurucul’s depth of unsupervised machine learning models focus on detecting unknown unknowns by building identity/user/entity/device and peer group centric behavior baselines to identify risky outlier behavior. This uncovers various different risky scenarios, unique to every customer environment, based on their behavioral patterns. Gurucul also provides a range of supervised machine learning models specially trained to identify specific types of attacks. These models are not signature based but “trained” on real-world threat data sets to detect and capture various known attacks.
Use case scenarios covered by Gurucul’s ML models include:
Gurucul Next-Gen SIEM improves detection, investigation, and response across any SIEM, including Splunk. Bring your own data lake or use ours to query and search for relevant security telemetry and store our enriched and scored findings. Our Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) capabilities provide context-driven, prioritized responses. We support the most common third party solutions for maximum flexibility and open choice.
Gurucul can search and “pull” appropriate event data into our analytical models. The platform receives, maps, and indexes any data format from other SIEMs and data lakes. We automatically map the data from the original event structure – whether it’s Common Information Model (CIM), Elastic Common Schema (ECS), Unified Data Model (UDM), XML, JSON, or other formats. Our data interpretation engine normalizes this data and extracts the security-relevant meta data into Gurucul’s schema. This provides a deployment vehicle for event data that originates from the same solution category, i.e., EDR, Sandbox, IDS, etc. We periodically query these platforms using their search capability to pinpoint data feeds that match our pipelines.
Data already resides in your current Splunk deployment, eliminating the need to store it twice. Gurucul searches for specific event feeds that equate to our analytic models. We use our own big data platform to run model activities. Additionally, we consolidate event data from other security tools using our 450+ integrations. By contrast, customers using Splunk tend to limit the data available from third-party tools to save on ingestion and storage costs. This forces analysts to log into separate systems when threat hunting and investigating events, which significantly slows their ability to detect and respond to threats.
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, finding the right analytics-powered next generation SIEM solution is paramount for businesses of all sizes. As organizations seek alternatives to Splunk, a well-structured checklist becomes an invaluable tool for evaluating options that best suit their unique needs and budgets. This section of our blog delves into the critical factors and considerations that will guide you through the process of identifying Gurucul Next-Gen SIEM as the ideal alternative to Splunk, ensuring that your data is harnessed, secured, and analyzed to its full potential.
Critical Features | Gurucul Next-Gen SIEM | Splunk Enterprise |
|---|---|---|
| Ability to automate mundane tasks & up-level analysts | YES | NO |
| High-fidelity detections | YES | NO |
| Automatically add Context (and limit swivel chair investigations) | YES | NO |
| Cloud First & Highly Scalable | YES | NO |
| Exceptionally Customizable | YES | NO |
| Vastly Flexible | YES | NO |
| Predictable costs | YES | NO |
| World class behavior analytics | YES | NO |
| White glove Service & Support | YES | NO |
| Security First Approach | YES | NO |
Selecting the right Splunk alternative solution is a critical undertaking for any organization seeking to fortify its cybersecurity posture. But replacing an existing SIEM solution that is struggling to keep up with today’s threats won’t happen overnight, it requires a plan executed over time. If your SIEM is maxed out, Gurucul is a Splunk alternative that can help you jump start the journey to full SIEM replacement by solving your most critical use cases first. Augment your Splunk SIEM initially with Gurucul Next-Gen SIEM to offload costly data ingestion and reduce the noise. Then see where the experience takes you – we are here to help! Discover the Next-Gen SIEM Advantage
The primary reasons are accurate detections of real-time threats with a case of evidence reducing the number of false positives (MTTD), and faster investigations with high-fidelity full context detections to spend less time to verify a threat, both of which accelerate response times (MTTR). The combination of high-fidelity detections, full context, and customizable response playbooks to help automate mundane tasks improves overall SOC efficiency. this frees up analysts to focus more on what matters most, eradicating threats.
See the checklist above.
Yes. Every enterprise is unique in its needs, environment, infrastructure, and risk tolerance. That is why Gurucul SIEM is cloud-native and architected to support the most complex hybrid, multi-cloud and distributed infrastructures. Because of its flexibility our customers have come up with creative ways using our platform to solve unique business security challenges that we hadn’t even considered.
Yes. You no longer have to wait for integrations and pipeline/parsers to be developed by third parties because we have 450+ pre-built integrations out of the box (please visit https://gurucul.com/technology), and new integrations usually take less than 24 hours and new API integrations often in less than a week.
