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When evaluating a SIEM, two key factors stand out: flexibility in data handling and open architecture. These two elements significantly enhance a platform’s efficiency and adaptability in managing cybersecurity threats. Whether you’re evaluating your current SIEM or looking for a more modern solution, here are five questions to ask to gauge its flexibility.

Can It Handle Structured and Unstructured Data?

The most powerful platforms can handle structured and unstructured data without requiring data transformation or normalization. This capability simplifies the data ingestion process, as data from various sources can be ingested in its original format. This reduces the workload and complexity of pre-processing data, ensuring that information is available for analysis more quickly and with less overhead.

Can You Easily Adjust Your Data Ingestion?

Data transformation and normalization can cause problems with data ingestion. For instance, migrating to a new firewall vendor or even upgrading to a new software version can affect the format of the data, which breaks the parser, resulting in lost data. This approach also leaves you with the processed version of the data, meaning you can’t go back and parse the data differently or look for something your parser may have ignored. This can lead to risky oversights in your security posture.

Does It Offer the Power of Collective Knowledge?

Integrating community-sourced threat intelligence and detection methodologies allows you to tap into collective experience and expertise, leading to more effective and timely identification of new and evolving threats. Access to a content marketplace that provides access to the SIEM vendor’s content, and content developed by other organizations that may see different attacks and face different adversaries, is advantageous.

Does It Integrate With Other Technologies?

You won’t succeed if your SIEM operates in a vacuum. It must play well with the rest of your security tools. For example, it must be able to ingest data from firewalls, EDR, IPS/IDS, and your cloud environments. It also must work with the SOAR platform you use today and any other solutions you might adopt down the road.

Can You Work On Any Cloud Platform?

Support for workloads in any cloud platform is critical for companies with multicloud and hybrid-cloud strategies. A platform that can cost-effectively aggregate data and operate seamlessly across different cloud environments provides significant advantages in terms of flexibility and scalability.

The Flexibility of a Security Data Platform

If you answered “no” to any of the questions above, it’s time for change. The answers to your flexibility challenges is a modern security data platform. The ɫɫ�о��� Security Data Platform offers a flexible, open architecture and checks all the boxes when it comes to comprehensive, efficient, and adaptable cybersecurity threat management. Wave goodbye to limitations and rigidity, and move toward a flexible, open solution.

Ready to learn more about what a modern security data platform offers? Download our 2024 SIEM Buyer’s Guide.