Dependence on Log Data | Twenty-first Century Networks Require Twenty-first Century Security Solutions

Christian Wiens Director of Marketing

Christian Wiens is Director of Marketing at MixMode. He has 10+ years of experience as a cybersecurity professional. He has his BA from The University of California, Berkeley and resides in Austin, TX.

This is the final installment of a three-part series on the vulnerabilities of log data dependence. You can catch the first two articles here:

Part 1: Dependence on Log Data | An Increasing Vulnerability to Threat Actors

Part 2: Dependence on Log Data | The Limitations, Hidden Costs, and Additive Nature of SIEM

When Cybersecurity teams assume that log-based platforms are the best available network security solutions, they have made a decision to invest in “bad gas.” These products will cost more and deliver less than systems enhanced by context-aware AI.

When the very system of record is incomplete or buried beneath layers of infrastructure that a SIEM can’t easily reach, the scope of what a security team can deliver is severely limited. MixMode is not dependent on specific data types or normalized, aggregated data logs. The platform can look independently at a wide range of information:

● All network traffic details

● Cloud trails

● API information

● Pre-summarized flow log information

● Post-aggregated log information

MixMode uses third-wave AI to apply advanced context-aware, correlative analysis. MixMode’s platform analyzes the behavior of an environment without having to filter, prioritize, or limit what is being analyzed or interpreted by third-party applications or hardware.

By moving away from the traditional log dependent cybersecurity software design, MixMode platform removes the time consuming and costly need to extract, transform, load, or manage data into multiple data repositories of log information. Early adopters of MixMode’s innovative platform are experiencing dramatic cost savings. These significant cost savings are coming from many areas, including rapidly expanding storage costs.

With no requirement to replicate or store data in a proprietary format, MixMode’s platform efficiently reduces workloads and storage costs, while also critically improving visibility around real-time cyber threats. Data does not need to be extracted, transformed, loaded, or managed into multiple data repositories of log information. Latency is dramatically decreased versus systems that require these tasks. Storage costs are dramatically lower with MixMode versus log-based Cybersecurity solutions, because there is no requirement to replicate or store data in a proprietary format. Better yet, MixMode delivers more visibility and more granularity by getting in front of those processes.

For better or worse, through years of analyst recommendations and lack of availability of a “better option,” SIEM and similar tools have become ingrained in the security operations center. And it cannot be ignored that SIEM’s can be very valuable for their original intended use: storing and categorizing log data for retroactive analysis. Because of this, it is important for next generation platforms like MixMode to integrate and work together seamlessly with these platforms.

Whether a security team is ready to replace their existing SIEM, or they need to keep it for compliance and other reasons, MixMode was built to be equally as valuable working alongside existing SIEM platforms. Clients who use SIEM and MixMode together gain the ability to look at full packet information, allowing teams to do things like eliminate redundant data, which leads to finer tuning of the system of record.

Learn more about MixMode and set up a demo today.