Top Challenges for Security Analytics and Operations, and How a Cloud-Based SIEM Can Help

Last updated at Wed, 03 Jan 2024 18:55:59 GMT

As the attack surface continues to grow, the job of a security professional is getting exponentially more complicated. With the surge in remote work over the last year, this has only accelerated. To keep up and combat key security operations challenges, many organizations are making the move to the cloud for broader, more flexible detection and response coverage of their ever-changing security environments.

According to a recent ESG study, the primary challenges regarding security analytics and operations are as follows:

• The growing attack surface
• A high volume of alerts
• The amount of time and energy spent addressing emergencies (instead of strategy and process improvement)
• The time it takes to detect and respond to security incidents

Cloud-based security solutions, like a SaaS SIEM, can help teams combat these primary challenges—read on to find out how.

Challenge: The attack surface is growing in size and complexity

The recent increases in remote work and cloud adoption have transformed the security landscape, making it significantly more complex. ESG’s study found that compared to 2 years ago, security analytics and operations are 63% more difficult for teams. A cloud-native SaaS SIEM can help. By collecting data from across an environment—including endpoints, logs, network traffic, users, and cloud—and correlating it in one single solution, this kind of solution provides teams with a holistic view in one place. While this won’t slow down the sprawling attack surface, it will give your team reliable, easy-to-access visibility across your entire organization to streamline security monitoring.

Challenge: Alerts are getting noisier

The scattered modern security environment is taking in a lot of data and information, which inevitably makes for very noisy alerting. Having all your critical security data in one place enables smarter detections and fewer alerts. For example, in a cloud SIEM like Rapid7’s InsightIDR that collects network traffic data alongside user behavior analytics, you’ll see more information about specific users, applications and devices—so what would have prompted an alert in a standalone network monitoring solution, like suspicious network activity, makes total sense within the context of an individual user who just started using a new application on their device. Which means no meaningless alert—hooray! Coupled with that, network traffic analysis can be used in combination with logs and agents for detections and for bringing additional context to investigations.

Challenge: Detecting and responding to incidents takes too long

Organizations of all sizes are experiencing the widening security skills gap. According to ESG’s study, 70% of security organizations say that it is extremely or somewhat difficult to recruit and hire SOC personnel. With fewer security professionals to detect, investigate, and respond to incidents, it takes significantly longer to remediate incidents. By leveraging a cloud-based SIEM, you’ll have fine-tuned detections and the actionable context needed for investigations in one place, cutting down on your mean time to remediation.

Challenge: Teams are stuck putting out fires instead of preventing them

The constant flood of event data coming in from all directions creates a ton of work for teams. Instead of spending time on advancing their security program strategy, they’re stuck putting out fires and dealing with emergency issues. By streamlining security operations with a cloud-based SIEM, you’ll spend less time jumping in and out of multiple tools and more time focusing on what matters most—moving your security program forward.