The phone rings. Your email pings. Your marketing team just told you about a flood of messages on social media and through live chat that there’s a service outage. You thought your Monday morning would be calm and relaxed since people are just returning from the weekend. How do you start researching all of these incoming tickets? How do you know which ones to handle first? Is this just a hardware failure, or are you about to embark on a security incident investigation like Log4j?

Cybersecurity can often seem intimidating for IT teams. After all, things like “threat hunting,” “red teaming,” and “blue teaming” are not used in IT operations. On the other hand, just because these words are terms of art doesn’t mean that they’re activities you don’t do already. You’re probably already using log data as part of your IT operations incident response.

As an IT operations manager, you spend a lot of your time mitigating service outages and service level risks. You worked diligently to get the right people, products, processes, and partners in place to meet your goals. You managed to ensure continued uptime. You’ve reduced the number of tickets and the cost per ticket. And for your efforts, you’re rewarded with managing your company’s cybersecurity program. The problem? You’re not a security specialist.

With the rising tide of data breach awareness, your senior leadership is asking you to mitigate cybersecurity risk with security analytics. You’ve built up the use cases and started researching different platforms. Then, you realized: you’re not sure you have the budget. The typical security analytics platforms come with upfront technology costs as well as the “hidden fees” associated with training your team members. You know you need to use analytics to help mitigate risk.

It’s been a week. A long week. After the most recent Board of Directors meeting, your senior leadership tasked you with finding a security analytics solution. Over the last month, you’ve worked with leadership to develop some basic use cases to determine which solution meets your security and budget needs. You started your research, but everything on the market seems really overwhelming. The Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools have the capabilities you want - and then some.

It’s time again for another meeting with senior leadership. You know that they will ask you the hard questions, like “how do you know that your detection and response times are ‘good enough’?” You think you’re doing a good job securing the organization. You haven’t had a security incident yet. At the same time, you also know that you have no way to prove your approach to security is working. You’re reading your threat intelligence feeds.

It’s mid-morning. You’re scanning the daily news while enjoying a coffee break. You come across yet another headline broadcasting a supply chain data breach. Your heart skips a quick, almost undetectable, beat. You have the technology in the headline in your stack. You set aside your coffee and begin furiously scanning through the overwhelming number of alerts triggered across all your technologies.

It was just another day in paradise. Well, it was as close to paradise as working in IT can be. Then, your boss read about another data breach and started asking questions about how well you’re managing security. Unfortunately, while you know you’re doing the day-to-day work, your documentation has fallen by the wayside. As much as people are loathed to admit it, this is where compliance can help.

Struggling with the evolving cybersecurity threat landscape often means feeling one step behind cybercriminals. Interconnected cloud ecosystems expand your digital footprint, increasing the attack surface. More users, data, and devices connected to your networks mean more monitoring for cyber attacks. Detecting suspicious activity before or during the forensic investigation is how centralized log management supports cybersecurity.

As you’re settling in with your Monday morning coffee, your email pings. The subject line reads, “Documentation Request.” With the internal sigh that only happens on a Monday morning when compliance is about to change your entire to-do list, you remember it’s that time of the year again. You need to pull together the documentation for your external auditor as part of your annual ISO 27000 and ISO 27001 audit.