By Fabio Fratucello, Field CTO, International, CrowdStrike
The cybersecurity threat landscape constantly presents new challenges to organisations, which must keep pace with fast and sophisticated adversaries. In 2023, threat actors used malware free tactics to gain initial access in an astounding 75% of attacks, revealing a dangerous evolution in tactics. Even more striking, the average eCrime breakout time — the time it takes adversaries to move laterally after compromising a host — was only 62 minutes. The fastest observed breakout time? Just 2 minutes and 7 seconds.
Stopping modern attacks requires security teams to match adversaries’ speed, but legacy SIEMs are holding them back. Designed for a time of smaller log volumes and slower adversaries, these systems have failed to evolve and scale with today’s data growth and advanced threats. Security teams struggle to investigate attacks quickly as they often manage a patchwork of antiquated SIEMs, sprawling data lakes and disjointed analytics tools.
Legacy SIEMs are now seen as black holes for data, growing as they absorb more telemetry and driving high volumes of false positive alerts — leading to slow response times, inefficient operations and soaring costs.
The next generation of SIEM
A new generation of SIEM (next-gen SIEM) represents a leap forward in helping security teams fight modern threats. Built from the ground up to converge data, AI and workflow automation in a unified cybersecurity platform, next-gen SIEM empowers security teams to operate faster and more efficiently to achieve the outcome that matters the most: stopping breaches.
Employees across the SOC can maximise their efficiency and effectiveness with next-gen SIEM. Consider these examples:
Security engineers
Security engineers encounter the daily challenge of managing legacy SIEMs with lengthy data migration projects and complex, fragmented architectures.
Next-gen SIEM transforms data onboarding by providing the security data engineers need — such as endpoint, identity and cloud workload data — within a unified platform. Security engineers no longer have to spend countless cycles onboarding data or deal with network latency or ingestion bottlenecks, because the most critical information from a detection and response perspective flows seamlessly within the platform. Next-gen SIEM effortlessly ingests, normalises, transforms and standardises any additional data required with out-of-the-box connectors and parsers so teams spend less time managing data and more time fighting threats.
Security analysts
Legacy SIEMs force security analysts to navigate multiple tools and consoles to extract meaning from data, and they burden analysts with low-fidelity alerts and manual processes, resulting in slow investigations and missed attacks.
As part of a unified platform, next-gen SIEM eliminates the need for security analysts to pivot across multiple tools and consoles, enabling them to analyse threats faster. Its built-in workflow automation helps analysts streamline processes and efficiently respond to threats. By simplifying the correlating and automating stages of incident response, next-gen SIEM empowers security analysts to focus on high-priority tasks without being bogged down by manual processes.
Next-gen SIEM also harnesses the power of generative AI automation and intuitive attack visualisation to elevate analysts of all skill levels so they can easily triage and investigate incidents.
Threat hunters
Threat hunters are constantly racing against time to uncover threats before damage is done.
Next-gen SIEM gives threat hunters the speed they need to find threats swiftly, delivering up to 150x faster search performance compared with legacy SIEMs. They also equip threat hunters with a robust query language and workflows so they can get the context they need to identify hidden threats across their organisation.
Chief Information Security Officers
Faced with escalating threats and soaring costs, how can CISOs chart a path to a future in which they can meet the demands of their board and sleep easy at night?
Next-gen SIEM helps CISOs achieve their strategic objectives. By consolidating multiple tools into a single platform, next-gen SIEM cuts down SOC complexity and administrative overhead. This frees CISOs up to redirect their focus on strategic initiatives to enhance the organisation’s security posture.
Next-gen SIEM represents a crucial evolution in cybersecurity, offering organisations the speed, efficiency and cost-effectiveness needed to combat modern threats. As adversaries are becoming faster and more sophisticated, and data growth is the new normal, embracing this technology will transform security operations and give your team an edge to stay ahead of adversaries in an increasingly complex digital landscape.
