Harnessing and interpreting data insights for actionable solutions lies at the heart of a robust cybersecurity strategy. For many SecOps teams, wrangling vast volumes of disparate data poses a significant challenge. Collecting and centralizing this data is essential for rapid threat detection and response within a SIEM, but it incurs exorbitant costs as data volumes continue to rise. Complicating matters further, compliance requirements may necessitate data residency in specific clouds or geographic locations, adding complexity and expense when having to search this data or duplicate and transfer for analysis. Without complete visibility across all critical data, effective security operations falter, particularly at enterprise scale where costs quickly spiral out of control. Gurucul is solving this data dilemma with the only cost-optimized unified security analytics platform—REVEAL.

The Problem of High Data Costs and Lack of Choices

Data is at the center of modern enterprise yet Forrester’s research underscores these challenges, with a staggering 82% of enterprises grappling with the unpredictability of data costs. Contributing issues include escalating data ingestion and data transfer fees compounded by the exponential growth of data. Traditional approaches prove increasingly untenable. unpredictability of data costs. 

Traditional SIEMs are overloaded, reliant on rule-based systems, and struggle to keep pace with evolving threats in real-time, leaving glaring protection gaps and too many false positives. A recent survey from Cybersecurity Insiders revealed 50% dissatisfaction among security professionals with their current SIEM solutions, with 40% citing excessive SIEM costs and more having concerns over scalability and data management.

Key issues plaguing current methodologies include:

1. High ingestion costs, forcing organizations to make difficult choices regarding which data to prioritize.
2. Data arrives in disparate formats from diverse sources, necessitating costly and cumbersome preprocessing.
3. Decentralized data impedes effective search and analysis, leading to visibility gaps and operational inefficiencies.

Solution: Gurucul’s REVEAL, the Only Cost-Optimized Security Analytics Platform 

Enter Gurucul’s REVEAL platform, a dynamic security analytics solution designed for agility, flexibility and scalability. Combining Next-Gen SIEM, UEBA, Identity Analytics, SOAR, and a native Data Optimizer into a unified console, REVEAL streamlines data management and analysis. Powered by advanced machine learning and AI, REVEAL delivers high-fidelity automatic threat detection and risk assessment in real-time, slashing investigation times by 50% and eliminating false positives. Moreover, REVEAL offers substantial SIEM cost savings, typically exceeding 40% compared to traditional SIEM and bolt-on data processing tools. In essence, Gurucul’s REVEAL platform not only unlocks the full potential of data analytics but also offers a cost-effective and manageable solution to the escalating challenges of modern cybersecurity.

Gurucul is the only security analytics platform and Next Gen SIEM that saves users money while solving these data management and compliance problems. It does this in three major ways: 

• Native data optimization grants organizations precise control over security data. This feature enables filtering, normalization, and enrichment of data, followed by routing to designated destinations such as data lakes, SIEMs, or low-cost cold storage. Notably, there are no additional charges associated with this capability. 
• Gurucul’s federated search empowers analysts to execute queries from a unified console, spanning all data sources including data lakes, cloud object storage, databases, identity systems, threat intelligence sources, and even other SIEMs like Splunk. This eliminates the expenses linked with duplicate data and transfers, allowing data to remain in its necessary location while remaining searchable regardless of its whereabouts. Do not have to rehydrate data to bring into the SIEM, we can search on data and it stays within our ecosystem reducing costs.

Gurucul provides low-cost cold storage for non-critical data, offering complimentary cold storage within its ecosystem, complete with pre-built connectors. This feature enables the filtration of unnecessary data, which can then be directed to cold storage while still being accessible through federated searches without rehydration costs.

Gurucul’s REVEAL takes away the burden of teams bogged down by the traditional SIEM rule-based policies and modernizes it with automation, AI, ML, and customization. Gurucul can be rolled out in days and is easy to implement—providing value right out of the box with a library of 3,000 pre-tuned ML models. The user-friendly GUI tool enables automated case management as well as custom ML model development without requiring data scientists. Threats are monitored in real-time for swift resolution of potential issues.

REVEAL comes with the Data Optimizer built-in to provide additional SIEM cost savings. 

“Gurucul Data Optimizer empowers organizations to gather the data they need, filter out what they don’t, and route it based on custom logic to wherever it needs to go, and in whatever format they need,” said Nilesh Dherange, CTO at Gurucul. “It helps solve challenges associated with Big Data management and transformation by giving users control while dramatically reducing SIEM costs. As with Gurucul’s entire open and flexible platform, Data Optimizer offers customers ease and choice. It integrates into any tech stack and can be fully customized to each environment.”

Data Optimizer SIEM Cost Savings 

Gurucul’s Data Optimizer, is an intelligent data engine that allows organizations to optimize their data while dramatically reducing SIEM costs, typically by 40% out of the box and up to 87% with fine-tuning. We guarantee 50% savings versus popular streaming costs like CRIBL which don’t provide visibility or machine learning into all data. This affords deep data discounts with no data transfer fees and an open and flexible ecosystem with free federated search. A universal collector and forwarder, Gurucul Data Optimizer works with any data source, destination, and format. It normalizes and enriches data while offering granular control so organizations can filter out unwanted data and route it to specific destinations based on its intended purpose, including data lakes, SIEMs and low-cost cold storage.

The Data Optimizer reduces noise. The data can reside where it is required to do so and still be accessible to analysts filtering unwanted data to reduce volume without losing the ability to replay it. Data is only transferred when needed, duplicate data is minimized and low-cost storage is readily available. REVEAL delivers full visibility into structured and non-structured data so analysts can easily search and analyze it within one ecosystem. It links activities from multiple sources to an identity or asset to simplify and speed investigations for deeper insights. It can monitor with ease by obtaining detailed stats about data and gaining quick visibility into data health and compliance.

With other platforms you can’t search data that is in cold storage or is outside the ecosystem. With data streaming platforms there are limits on data hydration and significant costs associated with it. No other security analytics platform or SIEM platform provides native data optimization because most SIEM vendors want to maximize ingestion volume and not reduce data costs.

Gurucul solves common issues with an intelligent data fabric:

• Ingest data from any source or format, without third-party services, data distribution tools, or parsing software;
• Filter data based on threat content to remove what isn’t needed for analytics. Then it’s normalized, parsed and enriched. This process reduces log volume, controls SIEM costs, and feeds threat models with quality data; and
• Link data from different sources to create context and patterns to accelerate actionable insights.

 This intelligent fabric powers Gurucul’s Data Optimizer, the only data processing tool of its kind offered natively within a SIEM. It collects, reduces, and routes data anywhere in the most cost-effective way. It can:

• Send critical data to REVEAL or another SIEM – and you only pay to ingest what’s needed for analysis;
• Send non-critical data to affordable cold storage without building connections to it or paying to rehydrate it. Data remains fully visible and searchable at no cost within our ecosystem, it’s never purged;
• Forward data to your data lake of choice; including Gurucul’s – which is at no cost;
• Search any data source like the cloud, identity systems, threat intel sources, and other SIEMs; and,
• Retain all data in the same location. You control compliance and ownership while reducing transfer and ingestion costs.

Data Optimizer Benefits and Features

By leveraging advanced technologies and innovative strategies, Gurucul empowers businesses to streamline operations, enhance efficiency, and maximize ROI, all while mitigating risks and maintaining compliance standards. Here are some of the Cost Optimizer benefits and features:

• Data collection from any source and any format using the Universal Data Collection Framework with a large library of built-in connectors and data pipelines.
• Visibility into real-time data trends to make informed filtering, transformation, and routing decisions.
• Flexible data retention for a configurable timespan with replay capability to provide data resilience throughout the data lifecycle including collection, transformation, archival and deletion.
• Low-code and no-code data reduction for on-premise and cloud data using Gurucul’s message and event filtering capabilities.
• Deduplication and data sampling to further reduce data volume.
• Fine-grained control over data with the ability to filter events based on data source priority, event type, data source, host, location, or any other custom attributes.
• Enabling advanced analytics and security investigations by normalizing data to a common schema and contextually linking disparate sources.
• Comprehensive and flexible data transformation capabilities empowering powerful functions including filtering (regex, remove, etc.), enrichment (external lookup join, concat, etc.), tagging (static) and transformation (lower/uppercase, replace, etc.).
• Granular and custom routing with the ability to fork data to multiple third-party destinations in any format and at any frequency based on fine-grained filters.

Data Optimizer is available as part of the Gurucul Security Analytics Platform, or as a standalone product. It works equally well with third-party SIEMs, UEBA, XDR, data stores and data lakes. Drive down data costs. Don’t pay additional expenses on disparate data tools when you can save money and leverage Gurucul’s single, unified tool for all your data analytics needs.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Blog Archives - Gurucul authored by Blog Archives - Gurucul. Read the original post at: https://gurucul.com/blog/how-to-drive-down-skyrocketing-data-costs-with-the-only-cost-optimized-siem/