3 Agile SIEM Requirements for Agile Security Teams

Regardless of economic conditions, IT usually operates under an axiom no one in business ever likes to hear: “We have to do more with less.” Doing more with less is essentially the default position for IT, but when it comes to security operations, that position can have real consequences.

People, tools, policies, and procedures are considered vital aspects of building a successful security program. But only enterprises with the deepest well of financial resources can have it all. Call it a skills shortage, call it living below the poverty line for enterprise security, call it belt-tightening, call it whatever you want: security teams are often asked to make sacrifices, and often the sacrifice that’s made is around the number of people employed on the team.

That approach forces modern security teams to be agile. They need to be agile both with their ability to do tasks quickly and to easily pivot to others. To aid in that effort, agile technology is needed in kind, and in particular an agile SIEM is needed to keep workflows moving.

We see three specific requirements for an agile SIEM for the agile security team: speed, flexibility, and efficiency. Let’s take a deeper look at each of these three SIEM requirements and what they mean for agile security teams.

Faster SIEM Capabilities Eases Workflow Burdens

As an agile security team, you’re expected to respond fast in the event of a security incident. It’s critical that your technology can respond equally fast to what you need, and often legacy SIEMs intended for on-premises or larger security teams don’t fit the bill.

We often hear complaints about legacy SIEM platforms with slow response times. Having a fast-working user interface makes a significant difference for agile security teams who lack the manpower of larger units. With an agile SIEM, teams can get the information they need faster so they can move on to other tasks. 

If a security operations team member can submit a complex query for months worth of data and know the results won’t take a long time to come back, they know they can get an investigation into possible issues going faster as well. A SIEM isn’t agile if it can’t deliver on speed to the teams that need it to work.

Interoperability is Key for a Flexible SIEM

When we speak to security teams about their SIEM needs, we hear a lot about the need for flexibility afforded by their platforms. This comes in a few different forms, but chiefly, teams are looking for interoperability. They need tools that are API-driven, built on cloud-native architectures, and have practices aligned with not only the current generation but future generations of technological practices. 

An agile SIEM that’s born in the cloud should provide flexible interoperability for systems to talk to each other and simplify workflows. Anything an agile security team wants to do, they should be able to do with an API call.

Flexibility also has implications for the kind of data enrichment teams can do in a SIEM. Pulling in external data sources to make data richer, or detections more precise, is an important aspect of an agile SIEM. For example, security teams should be able to enhance their organization’s security posture by building dynamic lists of contracted employees and critical assets such as customer data or other databases. The SIEM can then tell the team if one of those contractors accesses that critical data.

With an agile SIEM, flexible interoperability allows precise detection, automation, and workflow improvements that help security teams to their jobs more easily.

Efficiency Makes SIEM More Palatable for Enterprises

From a cost-efficiency standpoint, a SaaS-based, cloud-native, API-driven SIEM solution should help enterprises keep their spend down compared to legacy SIEMs. The old-school, on-premises approach from legacy SIEM providers no longer jibes with agile teams who expect providers in the SaaS era to handle management in the cloud.

Efficiency also comes in the form of wrapping services and customer experiences around the technology. This approach helps teams make the most of their SIEM capabilities even if they don’t have a big team to support security. Why would you have your only SecOps engineers on staff spending their entire day scaling their SIEM solution, rebalancing cluster, or re-indexing items when the technology should be able to do much of that for you?

For an agile SIEM, the product should be the service. It’s a service that provides around-the-clock customer support, security analysts on hand to build content, and automates the removal of menial, cumbersome tasks like parsing. All of this enables efficiency for agile security teams that simply can’t afford inefficiency.

A SIEM that’s fast, flexible, and efficient is exactly what teams expected to do more with less need for success in their mission. To learn more about how Logz.io can provide agile security teams with an agile cloud SIEM, request a demo today and a product expert will be in touch shortly.