Globally, the amount of security data has exploded in recent years, slowing down traditional security operations as a result. This growth in volume leads to increased costs, alert fatigue, and missed threats, requiring data refineries and distributors to find new ways to meet demand. The solution? Security telemetry pipelines. This emerging technology streamlines security operations for organizations, improving the processing and integration of security information through managing and analyzing high volumes of security data in various deployments.
Despite the heavy reliance on security information and event management (SIEM) and extended detection and response (XDR) solutions, organizations are seeking alternatives to improve them. As early as 2018, some of the top organizations in the world have sought new ways to approach security operations. A prime example is Netflix’s SOCless Detection Team, which recognized alert fatigue and sought a way to analyze data more effectively. They concluded that event pipelines enabled flexible assessment, detection, alert, and scaling. As the years have progressed, we’ve seen organizations of all sizes choose to bypass traditional SOC models in favor of a more streamlined approach.
Security data lakes and SOCless models address the challenge of high data volumes through simplified data storage capabilities, storing immense amounts of raw data that SOC teams can analyze as frequently as they want. Security telemetry pipelines integrate with data lakes to store raw data, replay, compliance, and route security data to tools like SIEMs, security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) solutions, other data lakes, and cloud object storage.
Benefits of security telemetry pipelines
Security Telemetry Pipelines present a multitude of benefits to organizations, building on existing solutions to address the increased volume of security data. Benefits include:
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Reduced Cost: Cutting out unnecessary data lowers processing and storing costs. This is a significant improvement from costly SIEM solutions basing their charges on ingest levels. -
Greater Efficiency: Security teams can expect a reduction in manual work as analysis, transformation, and enrichment are automated, freeing up team availability for more complex activities. -
Scalability: Easily navigate the elaborate environments that modify and redistribute data throughout its lifecycle, frequently passing through security analytics and automation tools. -
Improved Threat Detection: Oftentimes, relevant security data isn’t fully analyzed due to high costs and inadequate operations. Enhancing how we view data in its entirety before sectioning and assigning it out to relevant point solutions directly improves detection accuracy and makes identifying and categorizing threats more manageable within a large attack surface. -
Vendor-Agnosticism: Consolidation and distribution of data across the vast landscape of platforms and technologies are easy for organizations, circumventing vendor lock-in and utilizing high-quality tools that meet cost, performance, and scale requirements.
As market conditions shift, SIEM, XDR, and security telemetry solutions are slated to merge, causing security data lakes, cybersecurity mesh architecture (CSMA), and SOCless SIEM models to become more commonplace for organizations seeking solutions that meet security standards.
Notable capabilities of security telemetry pipelines
Security telemetry pipelines have already exceeded traditional security operations, using automation to manage data normalization and processing assignments. Transforming data prior to entering the SIEM and data lakes, these pipelines improve threat detection accuracy. Capabilities that make this possible include:
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Streamlined and Optimized Data Ingestion and Routing: Security telemetry pipelines make adapting to new data sources a breeze by making ingesting data from various sources more effective and manageable. Both guided and on-demand data transformations power data integration for a multitude of consumers, reducing demand for manually written and updated rules. -
Frictionless Data Integration: Contrasting security data streams unify into a single framework with security telemetry pipelines. This enables teams to draw correlations and determine security posture easily. Pipelines can transform, compress, and store data in a variety of formats using your organization’s preferred cloud storage location. Security teams can also use artificial intelligence (AI) to search this data, request analyses, and provide accurately formatted data to downstream analytics tools. -
Automated Data Hygiene and Curation: Refining, normalizing, and transforming security data are the main elements of data hygiene and curation. As much security data is considered redundant, the data hygiene process provides security teams with high-level, relevant information. Security telemetry pipelines make this possible by detecting and eliminating irrelevant information like duplicates or firewall logs, condensing multiple events into one, and reducing the amount of data requiring analysis. -
Contextual Enrichment of Security Data: Improving raw security event data using third-party resources enables security teams to detect, prioritize, and respond to threats effectively and on time. Security telemetry pipelines complete this by using data enrichment techniques like added threat intelligence data, Geo-IP information, anomaly detection, and other forms of context that offer more insights into security incidents. Enrichment in the data pipeline takes the weight off of SecOps teams to enhance the threat detection and response process and reduce the time required for incident response.
Security telemetry pipelines display immense promise as they provide the fabric to integrate new tools that streamline SecOps processes. As a result of automating formerly manual tasks, analysts have more availability to strategize security approaches. This is bolstered by real-time data enrichment and high-level analytics that make security operations more scalable and efficient even when presented with threats. The complexity of security landscapes requires security data pipeline models that enhance operations, improve security teams, and create customized, scalable detection and response solutions. As the volume of data increases, we can expect to see data pipelines being implemented to maintain security in our ever-evolving digital age.
The views expressed in this article belong solely to the author and do not represent The Fast Mode. While information provided in this post is obtained from sources believed by The Fast Mode to be reliable, The Fast Mode is not liable for any losses or damages arising from any information limitations, changes, inaccuracies, misrepresentations, omissions or errors contained therein. The heading is for ease of reference and shall not be deemed to influence the information presented.
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