Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Whether you’re an Apple fan or not, one of the reasons people buy into their ecosystem is ease of setup across different devices. In a world where people customize the applications on their laptops to cross over with their mobile phones, an easy setup is a key to getting the most value from their devices. However, in the world of security information and event management (SIEM) solutions, the time to value often takes longer than most security teams want to admit.

“Too many alerts mean missing the real threats.” Alert fatigue is one of the top threats to a SOC’s performance. When everything looks like a threat, nothing does. The tradeoff is disabling rules, overly tuning rules, or simply ignoring alerts just to stay afloat. The risk? High-value, low-noise threats slip through the cracks.

For many Security Operations Center (SOC) teams, every day feels like a balancing act just shy of burnout. The alerts don’t stop. The tooling gets in the way more than it helps. And analysts—the people at the heart of security operations—are left trying to untangle signals in a sea of noise, pressure, and constant escalation. This isn’t just a tooling issue. It’s a deeper misalignment: the gap between what SIEM was supposed to be and what security teams actually need.

Think back to being in high school and wanting to leave the room during class. Your teacher would give you a hall pass to show anyone monitoring the halls that you had permission to walk around. Your behavior, walking around during the class period, was suspect unless you followed the rule, getting a hall pass. For security teams, rule-based intrusion detections are the hall monitors that look for behaviors that indicate a problem.

If you have ever built a LEGO set, then you have a general idea of how telemetry works. Telemetry starts with individual data points, just like your LEGO build starts with a box of bricks. In complex IT environments, your security telemetry is spread across different technologies and monitoring tools, just like in a large build your LEGO bricks come separated into smaller, individually numbered bags. In both cases, the individual bricks or data points aren’t special.

Gamers of a certain age likely remember the video game Asteroids. You played as a little triangular spacecraft shooting at big space rocks that started traveling towards you slowly at first, then gained speed. As you revolved around trying to protect yourself by shooting them, you inevitably had to make some rapid decisions about which asteroids would harm your ship the most and which ones you could potentially ignore.

You’re standing in the grocery store, comparing the nutrition information for two different cereals. The enriched wheat bran cereal has more B12 vitamin content than your favorite sugary one. As an adult, you know that your body needs the additional vitamins in the enriched bran flakes, even if you really want that fruity, sugary hit in the morning. In security, your data needs that additional hit of nutrition so you can correlate and analyze events more effectively.