Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Playbooks — and automated processes in general — were once primarily associated with security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platforms, but that has changed recently. Many modern security information and event management (SIEM) solutions have started incorporating SOAR-like functionality, enabling you to automate security workflows and improve your mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR).

Have you ever wished for a tool that could guide you, even on the foggiest days? That was my father’s compass. He carried it not because it told him where he was, but because it reminded him where true north was. I spent twelve years in the U.S. Navy as a cybersecurity practitioner, and that same compass has stayed with me. And in the world of SIEM and threat detection, the Gartner Critical Capabilities for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) report feels like that compass.

The role of SIEM has never gone away. From the beginning, it’s been the backbone of security operations: the system where logs converge, alerts are analyzed, and incidents are investigated. What’s changed is our ability to use it correctly. Legacy, traditional SIEM tools forced trade-offs. Teams filtered data at ingest, dropped logs to control costs, or siloed analytics into disconnected point tools. The result was a SIEM that felt heavy, reactive, and underwhelming.

In technology, the proof of a lasting relationship is in the infrastructure — the pipelines, security services, and log plumbing have to work seamlessly together long before anyone sees the outcome. That’s precisely what Sumo Logic and AWS have built. Aligned around open standards like OCSF (Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework), integrated with services like Security Hub and GuardDuty, and connected through shared telemetry, it makes cloud security and observability possible at scale.

For too long, security has been defined by reaction, responding to every alert, chasing every anomaly, burning time and energy without clarity. But the strongest fighters don’t swing at every feint. They train, prepare, and conserve their energy for the moments that matter. That’s not just strength; that’s resilience. Now, this philosophy has entered the SOC. And it has a name: Sumo Logic Dojo AI.

If shadow IT was the SaaS era’s guilty pleasure, shadow AIT is GenAI’s sugar rush: unsanctioned AI models, tools, and autonomous agents quietly wired into business workflows—often without approvals, logging, or controls. It’s fast, it’s useful, and it can bite.

When we talk about emerging technologies and digitization, we often forget that while innovators work to bring the best security tools to market, malicious actors are concurrently working to identify loopholes and vulnerabilities in these new systems. Gone are the days when cyber attacks were a rare occasion; now, they happen almost daily.

Remember when we thought the application layer was where all the fun happened? Firewalls, WAFs, EDR, dashboards galore — the entire security industrial complex built around watching what apps do. Well, with “agentic AI” running the show, that middle ground is turning into a bypass lane. Instead of clicking through UIs or APIs, your AI buddy is making direct system calls, automating workflows at the OS and hardware level.

The question isn’t whether security information and event management (SIEM) is dead. The real question is whether the traditional model of SIEM still serves today’s defenders. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. Born from compliance needs and static rules, first-generation SIEMs provided log collection and correlation but not context. They buried analysts in noise and left threat detection slow, brittle, and expensive. But that’s changing.

Spotting threats fast and knowing whether they really matter is the name of the game in cybersecurity. That’s where user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) comes in, and why Sumo Logic’s latest innovation, historic baselining, is a big deal. With this release, Sumo Logic has turned the old UEBA model on its head, delivering insights that used to take weeks of learning time in just minutes. Here’s how and why that’s a game changer.