1 The Challenge

Modern organizations rely heavily on IT and data, making them prime targets for cyber attackers, including activist groups, cybercriminals, and state-sponsored entities. Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools are crucial to security operations centers (SOCs) for gathering, analyzing, and correlating security events from various sources. However, changes in the cyber threat landscape and business IT environments mean that traditional SIEMs can no longer provide value to the SOC.

The most common challenges that organizations are facing with traditional SIEMs are:

1.1 Integration

Since the introduction of SIEM systems almost two decades ago, the attack surface has expanded massively with digital transformation. Mobile devices, both personal and company-owned, are now part of the business IT environment, most organizations are using some form of cloud services, many are using cloud services from multiple providers, and there has been a rapid adoption of flexible working, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic. Traditional SIEMs lack interoperability with all the new sources of security data.

Consequently, they can no longer gather all the data needed for a comprehensive overview of security risks across the whole business IT environment. Traditional SIEMs also often do not integrate easily with other security systems such as cloud-based security solutions, endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions, identity and access management (IAM) systems, threat intelligence platforms, and network security appliances such as firewalls, and intrusion prevention/detection systems.