Last week, Mike Rothman of eIQ wrote a thoughtful piece on the struggles of the SIEM industry. He starts the post by saying the Security Information and Event Management space has struggled over the last decade because the platforms were too expensive, too hard to implement, and (paraphrasing) did not scale well without investing a pound of flesh. All accurate points, but I think these items are secondary to the real issues that plagued the SIEM market.

The issue with SIEM’s struggles in my mind was twofold: fragmented offerings and disconnection with customer issues. It is clear that the data SIM, SEM, and log management vendors collected could be used to provide insights into many different security issues, compliance issues, data collection functions, or management functions – but each vendor covered a subset. The fragmentation of this market, with some vendors doing one thing well but sucking at other important aspects, while claiming only their niche merited attention, was the primary reason the segment has struggled. They created a great deal of confusion through attempts to differentiate and get a leg up. Some did a good job at real-time analysis, some provide forensic analysis and compliance, and others excel at log collection and management. They targeted security, they targeted compliance, they targeted criminal forensics, and they targeted systems management – but the customer need was always ‘all of the above’.

Mike is dead on that the segment has struggled and it’s their own fault due to piecemeal offerings that solved only a portion of the problems that needed solving. More attention was being paid to competitive positioning than actually solving customer problems. For example, the entire concept of aggregation (boiling all events into a single lowest common denominator format) was ‘innovation’ for the benefit of the vendor platform and was a detriment for solving customer problems. Sure, it reduced storage requirements and sped up reporting, but those were the vendor’s problems more than customer problems.

The SIEM marketplace has gotten beyond this point, and it is no longer a segment struggling for an identity. The offerings have matured considerably in the last 3-4 years, and gone is the distinction between SIM, SEM and log management. Now you have all three or you don’t compete. While you still see some vendors pushing to differentiate one core value proposition over another, most vendors recognize the convergence as a requirement, as evidenced by this excellent article from Dominique Levin at Loglogic on the Convergence of SIEM and log management, as well as this IANS interview with Chris Peterson of LogRhythm. The convergence is necessary if you are going to meet the requirements and customer expectations.

While I was more interested in some of the problems SIEM has faced over the years, I have to acknowledge the point Mike was making in his post: the SIEM market is being hurt as platforms are oversold. Are vendors over-promising, per Dark Reading? You bet they are, but when have you met a successful software salesperson who didn’t oversell to some degree? A common example I used to see was some of the sales teams claiming they offered DLP equivalent value. While some of the vendors pay lip service to the ability to provide ‘deep content inspection’ and business analytics, we need to be clear that regular expression checks are not deep content analysis, and capturing network packets is a long way from providing transactional analysis for fraud detection or policy compliance. What gets oversold in any given week will vary, but any technology where the customer has limited understanding of the real day-to-day issues is a ripe target.

Conversely, I find customers I speak with being equally guilty as they promote the ‘overselling’ behavior. SIEM platforms are at the point where they can collect just about every meaningful piece of event data within the enterprise, and they will continue to evolve what is possible in analysis and applicability. Customers are not stupid – they see what is possible with the platforms, and push vendor as hard as they can to get what they want for less. Think about it this way: If you are a customer looking for tools to assist with PCI-DSS, and the platform cannot a) provide the near-real time analysis, b) provide forensic analysis, and c) safely protect its transaction archives, you move onto the next vendor who can. The first vendor who can (or successfully lies about it) wins. Salesmen are incentivized to win, and telling the customer what they want to hear is a proven strategy. So while they are not stupid, customers do make mistakes, and they need to perform their due diligence and challenge vendor claims, or hire someone who can do it for them, to avoid this problem.

I am very interested to see how each vendor invests in technology advancement, and what they think the next important step in meeting business requirements will be. What I have seen so far indicates most will “cover more and do more”, meaning more platform coverage and more analysis, which is a safe choice. Similarly, most continue to offer more policies, reports, and configurations that speed up deployment and reduce set-up costs. Some have the vision to ‘move up the stack’, and look at business processing; some will continue to push the potential of correlation; while others will provide meaningful content inspection of the data they already have. Given that there are a handful of leading vendors in this space on a pretty even footing, which advancement they choose, and how they spin that value, can very quickly alter who leads and who follows.

The value proposition provided by SIEM today is clearer than at any time in the segment’s history, and perhaps more than anything else, SIEM platforms are being leveraged for multiple business requirements across multiple business units. And that is why we are seeing SIEM expand despite economic recession. Because many of the vendors are meeting revenue goals, we will both see new investments in the technology, and begin to see serious acquisitions.

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