The Next Wave of Innovation in SIEM, Security Analytics and TDIR

When I speak to customers and prospects about their cybersecurity challenges and the struggles they face using the incumbent set of technologies, it’s a consistent chorus of two main concerns: 

1. Their SIEM isn’t designed for big data workloads. It can barely keep up with alerts, but they also want to collect all manners of logs and additional context because without that, they are back to having limited visibility.
2. Tools they use for threat detection, investigation and response (TDIR) are uninspiring; they lack intuition and an understanding of the role of the analyst who spends a significant amount of time using them.

It’s loud and clear: something has to change.

This is a classic example of market dynamics outpacing innovation. Over the past several years, the enterprise workforce has transitioned to a hybrid model, data volumes have continued to grow exponentially, cloud application and platform adoption have increased, and more and more companies are embracing a transition to digital. All of these factors combined mean more threat exposure, a larger attack surface, and greater cybersecurity challenges for organizations. Just as we witnessed in 2013 when we founded Exabeam and introduced User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA), a new disruption is needed.

Introducing UEBA was a revolution in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) market. At the time, end users relied heavily on correlation rules for detection, leaving organizations exposed to attacks they couldn’t see coming because they could not be defined with the simple logic of a correlation rule. The incumbent SIEM products lacked these advanced capabilities, and Exabeam created a business by augmenting legacy tools with an analytics overlay.

A few years later, we expanded to include a data lake and responded to the shift towards cloud applications with the ability to collect logs from cloud services using pre-built cloud connectors, offering a full-functioning SIEM. Since then, we have added more advanced functionality with Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) capabilities and  transitioned to a cloud-delivered SIEM. Most recently, we have brought efficiency through automation to the investigation experience by applying machine learning insights to the triage process. These successes — delivering the industry’s most advanced products for SIEM and TDIR — have earned us leadership status with all of the major analyst firms, including Gartner and Forrester.

We are not standing still, though. The next phase of disruption leverages the industry’s most advanced cloud infrastructure to build and enable the Exabeam next generation cybersecurity platform, featuring: cloud scale data collection and transformation, storage without limits, and powerful visualizations. This evolution was recently announced in our Google Cloud Partnership.

Exabeam’s cloud-native offering seeks to deliver four critical benefits to customers:  

1. Security platform for cloud-scale — Exabeam is building a security operations platform to support cloud-scale scale with a cloud-native, lightning-fast SIEM.
    
2. Limitless data ingestion and processing — Exabeam will differentiate itself from legacy SIEM products that struggle to process massive volumes of data. Exabeam will create a path to petabyte-scale data processing built on Google Cloud. 

3. Breakthrough search experience — Traditionally, security solutions have been limited by scale and forced to partition data in multiple ways. The Exabeam platform will break through the many limitations and provide Security Operations teams with search capabilities they never imagined.  A single search interface for multi-year log and event data search. A query builder to enable the most junior analysts to craft complex and compelling inquiries and log searches with no learning curve. 

4. Automated TDIR — Exabeam will build on our leadership, enabling TDIR and automating the entire TDIR workflow. Automation will drive risk scoring, surfacing notable users and activity so security teams know the most important events to investigate. We will also continue to innovate our contextual Smart Timelines that accelerate investigation and response by automatically reconstructing hundreds of security data points into clear chronologies of security incidents.

In a category defined by data at scale, Exabeam is building a platform for the data-driven cybersecurity applications of tomorrow, leveraging the open, secure, and sustainable Google Cloud. 

We aim to solve the well-documented challenges of Security Operations teams who are currently struggling to deliver TDIR. We plan to eliminate the Security Operations effectiveness gap and disrupt the conventional thinking about SIEM. What if your Security Operations platform allowed you to:

• Automatically detect, investigate, and respond to threats in record time and with greater accuracy?
• Have pre-packaged parsers for security, cloud, and identity products with full indexing of logs at the ingestion?
• Have infinite scale with limitless data ingestion and processing capabilities?
• Search across all your new and historical security data with little to no latency?
• Easily use powerful analytics and visualizations to help security analysts efficiently triage, detect, and investigate threats?

This is the future we are creating — stay tuned for more on the next Exabeam disruption. 

The Exabeam Fusion Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study by Forrester Consulting revealed how a group of Exabeam Fusion SIEM customers achieved a composite ROI of 245% over three years, with a payback period of less than six months.

Read the report to learn:

• Four measurable areas where customers achieved ROI using Exabeam Fusion SIEM
• Why customers choose Exabeam Fusion SIEM
• How the Exabeam Next-gen SIEM can transform security operations