Bridging The Visibility Gap With AI-driven SIEM

For a long time now, cybersecurity discussions have shifted from the IT departments to corporate boardrooms. With the increasing complexity of threat vectors and the expansion of attack surfaces, organizations face the need for sophisticated cybersecurity solutions, amidst an acute shortage of cybersecurity experts. Furthermore, affected organizations also incur huge penalties both from regulatory actions and loss of customer trust. From a security perspective, the status quo of traditional security information and event management (SIEM) solutions is no longer acceptable. Reiterating the growing need for broad-range IT estate visibility, a recent study cites that by 2026, over 60% of threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR) capabilities will use exposure management data to validate and prioritize identified threats.

Organizations must prioritize data enrichment to attain 360-degree visibility into IT assets. An ideal MSSP should address this need by deploying data enrichment as a regular practice, thus delivering the necessary contextual insights for efficient decision-making.

The underlying challenges to attaining cybervisibility

An organization’s IT assets, software assets, and attack surfaces form its IT estate. While SIEM plays a crucial role in consolidating log and event data from networks, security, and data center hardware and software, additional cyber-intelligence is required for a comprehensive view. However, there are challenges in obtaining context-sensitive data to prevent cyberevents due to gaps in processes across the IT estate.

Solution disparity: Point product solutions are designed to focus on specific parts of the IT infrastructure, such as operating system software, application software, software-as-a-service (SaaS) components, or hardware components. However, the derived insights are limited only to those specific areas, restricting a comprehensive view of the entire IT system.

Attack surface management (ASM): Multiple employees or third-party contractors operating in public or remote cloud environments might intentionally or accidentally allow threat elements to breach an application, system, device, network, or organization. ASM includes visibility from a public segment. It is vital for organizations to go for solutions that identify and include IT estate from the WAN or public point of view, which is currently absent.

Lack of contextual information: To understand and address cybersecurity threats effectively, organizations need to aggregate the fragmented IT estate components. Contextual insights can be derived by assimilating data from various sources such as user directories, asset inventory tools like CMDB, geolocation tools, third-party threat intelligence databases, etc. This enriched data can help organizations prevent cyberincidents by providing a broader and more comprehensive perspective.

Limited decision management: Legacy SIEM solutions often predefine correlation rules, rendering their risk logic incapable of adapting to advanced threats. Current SIEM solutions primarily work on forensics gauged by Windows/Linux-based journal entries that offer limited visibility, thereby affecting contextual cybersecurity decision-making.

Mapping IT assets for better visibility

Organizations must prioritize data enrichment to attain 360-degree visibility into IT assets. Viewing from an SIEM lens – automation is key to providing efficient and accurate data enrichment. To exemplify, the integration of applications is crucial to ensure data access and sharing. Through automated workflows, organizations can ensure that the appropriate data is automatically matched and sent to the correct channels to drive actionable measures. SIEM capabilities can be expanded by leveraging data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML). Over 90% of SIEM solutions would be cloud-based from 2023 onwards. That said, proactive measures during security events can be improved by integrating configuration management databases (CMDBs) into an ASM platform. Time-critical actions by the network operations center (NOC), security operations center (SOC) or system reliability engineering (SRE), such as responding to new threats will require contextual insight. Our MSSP platform and SOC solutions address this need by deploying data enrichment as a regular practice. The MSSP platform’s network sensors also provide additional enrichment in the network area, thus delivering the necessary contextual insights for efficient decision-making.

Benefits of MSSP platform on cloud

The salient advantages of the MSSP platform and SOC solutions are as follows:

Cloud-native AWS platform: Powered by application programming interfaces (APIs) on AWS, the solutions offer seamless expansion and contraction. This enhances the elasticity to address log throttling.

Contextual insights: Through integration, the complementary functionalities of hardware and software CMDBs and ASM are leveraged to provide contextual information. This helps organizations to make quick and effective decisions.

Guaranteed cyber-response: During incidents within premises, logs are often lost, and incident response cannot be triggered on time. In case of downtimes, the solution can analyze logs, debug and evaluate the scenario to trigger a timely incident response (IR).

Effective decision-making: Big data, AI, and ML, aid in better visualization and analysis of large volumes of data produced in the cybermesh. The graph-based reports help organizations to make better cybersecurity decisions.

Illuminating the path toward securing growth

With modern businesses increasingly relying on cloud and hybrid infrastructures, there is a pressing need for SIEM tools to be more intelligent. The key lies in a two-pronged communication between sourcing log and event data. AI-driven innovations can be pivotal in enhancing SIEM capabilities including operational capabilities such as compliance reporting, incident management, and dashboards that prioritize threat activity. This will help organizations welcome a future wherein they won’t have to choose between long-term growth and budget-friendly solutions.