Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Recently, Security Boulevard published an article I wrote about the role technology plays in the modern security operations center (SOC). It’s a topic near to my heart, since I began working in SOCs back when we were known as “computer incident response teams” (CIRT). Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of outstanding technologies hit the market that have contributed greatly to improving security teams’ ability to identify, investigate and respond to threats.

This month Devo exhibited at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. I asked a few Devo colleagues who attended the show for their insights about what they heard and saw. Among the many visitors to the Devo booth there were a lot of similar questions about log management and related topics. “There were many log vendors at the show, so people wanted to hear what makes Devo unique,” said Seema Sheth-Voss, vice president, product marketing, for Devo.

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.

Across the board, security teams of every industry, organization size, and maturity level share at least one goal: they need to manage risk. Managing risk is not the same as solving the problem of cybersecurity once and for all, because there is simply no way to solve the problem once and for all. Attackers are constantly adapting, developing new and advanced attacks, and discovering new vulnerabilities.

Security analytics is not a particular tool, rather it is an approach to cybersecurity. Thorough analysis of data in order to implement proactive security measures is the essence of security analytics. It includes gathering data from every possible source to identify patterns. Nobody can predict the future but with cybersecurity analytics, you can make pretty accurate, informed guesses about it.