Logging

The past few months have been busy for us at Devo! We’ve been on a security conference tour; the first stop was Gartner Security & Risk, then AWS re:Inforce, and last week, Black Hat. Black Hat was exciting because, in case you missed it, we announced our vision for and showcased our next-gen cloud SIEM!

As the worldwide spending on SaaS spending will make up more than half of all public cloud services spending through 2019, it is critical to have end-to-end visibility into threats across your SaaS and on-premise applications. Sumo Logic and Netskope are collaborating on a technical integration that will help joint customers use Sumo Logic to correlate, validate and investigate Netskope alerts into their overall security incident investigation process and understand SaaS application usage patterns.

In our recent article, we outlined the benefits of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems, and why it is a must-have for every organization that operates in today’s cyberspace. It remains the best solution that proactively targets proliferating security threats, though SIEM also brings a number of risks and challenges. In this blog, we address these challenges and explain how they can be overcome by opting for SIEM-as-a-Service instead of on-premises or other options.

IDC says to estimate reaching 175 zettabytes of data by 2025, a 61 percent increase from today’s data volumes. Business leaders and IT executives overwhelmingly agree that they can do more to harness this data, but are we as an industry lacking for imagination? Or do we simply not know where to start or how to progress? To add insult to injury, today’s enterprises are stuck in the land of silos and replication, and too much data wrangling that consumes an already oversubscribed budget.

If you’re reading this, you likely know what a log is, and what a metric is. But sometimes there are questions on their differences, whether you really need both, and if you should use dedicated solutions to manage each type. The answers? Yes, you need both; yes, they should be unified. Logs and metrics, aka machine data, are complementary.

Not investing in Security Incident and Event Management solutions means you’re missing out on significant business benefits. SIEM detects and responds to security incidents in real time, which reduces the risk of noncompliance. It also helps realize greater value across all underlying security technology and systems. Reporting with SIEM is more comprehensive and less time-intensive, helping to reduce capital and operational costs through consolidation.

The data visualization space is crowded. There are lots of tools, each purporting to be the tool that solves your data woes and leads you to insight via illustrations. But while you may get good-looking graphs, you are probably not seeing the behind-the-scenes pain from IT: analytics dashboards and vertical applications take multiple meetings for gathering requirements, and they discover the direction wasn’t quite right the first time around.

Undoubtedly, log management is the heart of any SIEM solution. The more access to logs your SIEM has the better it will be able to perform. Logs help in identifying who attacked your organization and how these malicious actors penetrate your corporate network. By logging all the vital information related to network devices and other critical systems, you will be able to get a deeper insight into your organization’s cybersecurity posture.

There’s a lot of talk about the ability of AI and machine learning to augment digital transformation journeys by creating better customer experiences and empowering employees to make decisions using data. However, IT and business leaders can sometimes face analysis paralysis when confronted with this topic because it means something different for every business – and it means shifting an entire company culture towards a new way of working. One key shift is making use of machine data.