Many security professionals feel the deck is stacked against them. Adversaries continue to improve their techniques, aided by plentiful malware kits and botnet infrastructures. Continued digitization at pretty much every enterprise means everything of interest in on some system somewhere. Don’t forget the double whammy of mobile and cloud, which democratizes access without geographic boundaries, and takes the one bastion of control, the traditional data center, out of your direct control. Are we having fun yet? Of course the news isn’t all bad – security has become very high profile. Getting attention and resources can sometimes be a little too easy – life was simpler when we toiled away in obscurity bemoaning that senior management didn’t understand or care about security. That’s clearly not the case today, as you get ready to present the security strategy to the board of directors. Again. And after that’s done you get to meet with the HR team trying to fill your open positions. Again. In terms of fundamentals of a strong security program, we have always believed in the importance of security monitoring to shorten the window between compromise and detection of compromise. As we posted in our recent SIEM Kung Fu paper: Security monitoring needs to be a core, fundamental, aspect of every security program. There are a lot of different concepts of what security monitoring actually is. It certainly starts with log aggregation and SIEM, although many organizations are looking to leverage advanced security analytics (either built into their SIEM or using third-party technology) to provide better and faster detection. But that’s not what we want to tackle in this new series, titled Managed Security Monitoring. It’s not about whether to do security monitoring, it’s a question of the most effective way to monitor resources. Given the challenges of finding and retaining staff, the increasingly distributed nature of data and systems that need to be monitored, and the rapid march of technology, it’s worth considering whether a managed security monitoring service makes sense for your organization. The fact is that, under the right circumstances, a managed service presents an interesting alternative to racking and stacking another set of SIEM appliances. We will go through drivers, use cases, and deployment architectures for those considering managed services. And we will provide cautions for areas where a service offering might not meet expectations. As always, our business model depends on forward-looking companies who understand the value of objective research. We’d like to thank IBM Security Systems for agreeing to potentially license this paper once completed. We’ll publish the research using our Totally Transparent Research methodology, which ensures our work is done in an open and accessible manner. Drivers for Managed Security Monitoring We have no illusions about the amount of effort required to get a security monitoring platform up and running, or what it takes to keep one current and useful, given the rapid adaptation of attackers and automated attack tools in use today. Many organizations feel stuck in a purgatory of sorts, reacting without sufficient visibility, yet not having time to invest to gain that much-needed visibility into threats. A suboptimal situation, often the initial trigger for discussion of managed services. Let’s be a bit more specific about situations where it’s worth a look at managed security monitoring. Lack of internal expertise: Even having people to throw at security monitoring may not be enough. They need to be the right people – with expertise in triaging alerts, validating exploits, closing simple issues, and knowing when to pull the alarm and escalate to the incident response team. Reviewing events, setting up policies, and managing the system, all take skills that come with training and time with the security monitoring product. Clearly this is not a skill set you can just pick up anywhere – finding and keeping talented people is hard – so if you don’t have sufficient expertise internally, that’s a good reason to check out a service-based alternative. Scalability of existing technology platform: You might have a decent platform, but perhaps it can’t scale to what you need for real-time analysis, or has limitations in capturing network traffic or other voluminous telemetry. And for organizations still using a first generation SIEM with a relational database backend (yes, they are still out there), you face a significant and costly upgrade to scale the system. With a managed service offering scale is not an issue – any sizable provider is handling billions of events per day and scalability of the technology isn’t your problem – so long as the provider hits your SLAs. Predictable Costs: To be the master of the obvious, the more data you put into a monitoring system, the more storage you’ll need. The more sites you want to monitor and the deeper you want visibility into your network, the more sensors you need. Scaling up a security monitoring environment can become costly. One advantage of managed offerings is predictable costs. You know what you’re monitoring and what it costs. You don’t have variable staff costs, nor do you have out-of-cycle capital expenses to deal with new applications that need monitoring. Technology Risk Transference: You have been burned before by vendors promising the world without delivering much of anything. That’s why you are considering alternatives. A managed monitoring service enables you to focus on the functionality you need, instead of trying to determine which product can meet your needs. Ultimately you only need to be concerned with the application and the user experience – all that other stuff is the provider’s problem. Selecting a provider becomes effectively an insurance policy to minimize your technology investment risk. Similarly, if you are worried about your ops team’s ability to keep a broad security monitoring platform up and running, you can transfer operational risk to the provider, who assumes responsibility for uptime and performance – so long as your SLAs are structured properly. Geographically dispersed small sites: Managed services also interest organizations needing to support many small locations without a lot of technical expertise.
