LogRhythm Cloud: Too Little, Too Late

Over the last 12 months, we’ve seen growing momentum around several disruptive trends in the cloud SIEM market. One of the most pervasive and obvious developments for Logz.io is the frequency with which we encounter customers seeking to replace dated and legacy on-premises SIEMs with a solution such as our Cloud SIEM. The traditional provider that comes up most often is LogRhythm—for numerous different reasons.

The big challenge with LogRhythm is primarily driven by the requirement to manage aging and non-scalable hardware appliances or VMs on an ongoing basis; this is onerous, time-consuming work that few teams are eager to tackle. As organizations adopt a wider range of SaaS and IaaS technologies, incorporating cloud data sources to your SIEM is essential and a veritable no-brainer, but undertaking this effort is hugely challenging when dealing with dated vendor solutions like LogRhythm. 

This growing tendency toward supporting a broader swath of cloud services significantly impacts the overall threat profile of your organization and infrastructure. As a result, your SIEM must include native support to collect and analyze this information. Sizing the solution for the right volume of data is another major challenge.

For someone like LogRhythm—with one foot in the past, maintaining its on-premises SIEM legacy architecture, and another foot in the present, having introduced a cloud offering by piecing together a patchwork of internal and acquired technology. This results in the solution spanning multiple UIs and lacking a cohesive product strategy—achieving this goal has proven no simple task. 

Why Logz.io Meets Modern SIEM Needs

With Logz.io, delivering on the Cloud SIEM value proposition is straightforward and clear. For starters, we provide a fully cloud-native solution, meaning we automate scalability by leveraging market leading cloud providers. Importantly, this enables us to design natively to ingest data from cloud services in a modern API driven way.

Operating from the knowledge that nearly every security organization is suffering from staffing shortages, LogRhythm users are particularly challenged in this domain. SIEM users consistently critique their SIEM for its shortcomings and high costs related to setting up, maintaining, and deriving value from the limited content updates inherent to its SIEM products.

LogRhythm implementations typically include a heavy dose of professional services, which adds even more cost and complexity. Finally, when the initial deployment engagement is “complete”, it’s widely regarded that their SIEM is difficult to configure when adding more data sources or undergoing reconfiguring—at least without paying for more professional services.

Conversely, a Logz.io Cloud SIEM subscription specifically features the required expertise, including ongoing interaction with our security analysts—at no additional cost, to ensure that  use of our SIEM is successful and effective. Unlike LogRhythm, we don’t require professional services using the model of legacy vendors.

As your cloud data scales, so must your SIEM, especially when you’re dealing with security incidents that can quickly spike and massively increase related data volumes. Most SIEMs, especially legacy solutions, cannot efficiently handle this scenario, and we’ve heard directly from LogRhythm customers that performance of their products suffer greatly, or more appliances need to be purchased to handle larger data volumes. This is not an issue with Logz.io, as we are purpose built on leading clouds, with limitless scalability always on demand, and priced effectively.

Many CIOs and CISOs are moving to SaaS services to simplify their attack surface, especially after the SolarWinds supply chain compromise, but there’s another reason for selecting a cloud-native SIEM: product and content updates.

With new threats emerging, constantly keeping the SIEM updated with the newest threat intelligence, the latest integrations and APIs, along with the newest content being built, is essential. This not only allows for supporting new data sets, but also for protecting against the latest threats. SIEMs that are designed for the cloud have an advantage over legacy software systems like LogRhythm in this regard. The Logz.io team is constantly adding more value in the shape of content to detect, along with alerts, dashboards, and reports on the newest threats and technologies. We call this “content as a service” and it is a core element of the solution, not an add-on with additional costs.

A SIEM Built for the Cloud

The advantages of running in the cloud are obvious to users, and this is obviously the main reason why LogRhythm itself has attempted to introduce a viable cloud offering. Unfortunately, like other on-premises SIEM providers, such as Splunk, this is merely a hosted version of the on-premises product in a cloud IaaS. This means the same challenges with scale and integration exist. Think of it like running a DVD in the cloud.

The involved requirement of engaging a heavy lift of professional services to make implementations successful means that most organizations will fail to get value out of the platform over time as their environment and applications change. With Logz.io, we ensure your ongoing success through the hands-on support delivered by our analyst team and your customer success engineer, who ensure that you’re always getting optimal value from the Logz.io Cloud SIEM solution. 

Although most organizations run a lot of different operating systems, LogRhythm really struggles with non-Windows environments. In the real world, most organizations also run a good amount of Linux and even Macs. If your SIEM doesn’t handle these types of data, you will be unable to appropriately handle related threats. Logz.io has the widest level of support for various technologies due to our open-source underpinnings.

As you can see, the reasons why LogRhythm customers are adopting Logz.io en masse are  obvious and multi-factored, primarily based on the technical challenges involved in scaling a 20-year-old platform to adapt to a cloud native world.  

If LogRhythm isn’t meeting your needs, sign up for a free trial of Logz.io’s Cloud SIEM today. We’d love to show you how we are offering a truly different approach to the modern, cloud native SIEM.