News

Gaining holistic visibility with Elastic Security

By
Jae Lee

Let’s talk visibility for a moment. 

Security visibility is a data-at-scale problem. Searching, analyzing, and processing across all your relevant data at speed is critical to the success of your team’s ability to stop threats at scale. Elastic Security can help you drive holistic visibility for your security team, and operationalize that visibility to solve SIEM use cases, strengthen your threat hunting practice with machine learning and automated detection, and more. 

Why is visibility important?

Security requirements continue to evolve. Modern security teams are tasked with significantly more responsibility than managing the alert queue. They are aligned to the business, and therefore need to answer not only difficult and complex technical questions, but also questions that help inform investment decisions and even the strategic direction of the organization.

Consider the following global trends:

Digital transformation initiatives

Impact: 

  • New attack types and vectors: more information technology (IT), more operational technology (OT), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile
  • Distributed workforce: more insecure connectivity/bring your own device (BYOD)

Requirement:

  • Visibility needed across larger attack surface

New attack methodologies

Impact: 

  • Latest threat tactics/techniques can go undetected
  • More time and resources needed to stay current

Requirement:

  • Deeper visibility needed from existing data (e.g., behavioral insights)

Unified operations and cloud migration

Impact: 

  • More people working off same data
  • Highly distributed, inconsistent architectures

Requirement:

  • Same or better visibility needed by more teams, at cloud scale

Accelerated pace of change

Impact: 

  • Unexpected infrastructure changes
  • Exacerbates skills shortage/understaffed teams

Requirement:

  • Greater efficiency, adaptiveness, resilience needed

The requirements above raise new questions and complicate the manner in which we answer existing questions. Security teams need the right visibility to answer these questions. Learn more about gaining holistic visibility.

Threat hunting for visibility

Threat hunting — the proactive pursuit and elimination of adversaries before they cause damage and loss — can help analysts and security teams better understand where important assets reside (such as privileged accounts and sensitive business systems) and provide deeper visibility into activities associated with those assets.

The effectiveness of a threat hunt depends on access to the right data sources. Having the right data means proving or disproving hypotheses more quickly and accurately. For a hunt practice to be effective and capable of operational scale, any data that provides visibility into important assets needs to be easily accessible, and hunt teams need the ability to quickly extract insights from that data.

See real-world examples of how specific data sources can be used to prove or disprove threat hunting hypotheses in our recent webinar by Devon Kerr, Elastic Security’s team lead of Intelligence & Analytics.

Visibility starts with Elastic

The technological advantage of data storage (security-related and otherwise) in Elasticsearch is a key distinction in what makes Elastic Security so effective at holistic visibility. 

Built on the speed and scale Elasticsearch is known for, the free and open Elastic Security solution enables analysts everywhere to detect and respond to threats through a unified approach to addressing top security use cases —  SIEM, endpoint security, threat hunting, cloud monitoring, and more. 

Try Elastic Security on Elastic Cloud (14 days free, no credit card required). Or, deploy it on-prem, where it’s always free.