The Benefits of a Cribl Optimized SOC

BLUF: A review of how everyone in a SOC can benefit by controlling their data with Cribl. 

Today, our focus is on the benefits of a Cribl Optimized SOC (Security Operations Center) and how it can be utilized to maximize value for security use cases.

To start, it’s crucial to understand the SOC framework, then we’ll look at the benefits of implementing Cribl for individual contributors and business leaders. 

Inside the SOC

In a typical SOC, there are 4 teams performing specific functions:

• Security Engineering– collects, parses, and cleanses data for detection, triaging, and alerting.
• Threat Detection- creates queries or logic rules to escalate alerts to the Operations Team.
• Operations– The Tier I, II, and III analysts who triage and remediate alerts as they appear. 
• Leadership – the business side of the SOC ensuring it operates smoothly and cost-effectively. 

The methods and systems these teams use to bring data into the SOC are referred to as Data Pipelines. Pipelines include syslog servers, Splunk Heavy Forwarders, Lambda functions, data connectors, and a continuously expanding assortment of agents deployed on systems.

Cribl offers a centralized pipeline solution to collect, route, filter, and transform data providing enhanced storage cost control and reducing administrative workload.

Benefits for Individual Contributors

Cribl serves as a comprehensive control panel for data pipelines. Monitoring these pipelines is crucial for any SOC. Disruptions can hinder data flow, affecting efficiency of threat detection and allowing attackers to go unnoticed.

The Cribl Health Monitor utilizes API-based sources to verify activity and accessibility. By using Cribl metrics, users can monitor data pipelines, ensuring destinations are receiving the expected data. 

Understanding which server collects data and which configuration file manages it can be challenging.  SOI has encountered environments where there are over 30 syslog servers, each with individual configurations. Cribl Stream simplifies the process of managing these pipelines by providing a user interface which allows individual contributors to quickly parse and understand how your data pipelines function.

Benefits for Leadership

Cribl provides options on how best to control data costs and accelerate innovative ways to make the SOC more efficient. As we move into an AI driven world, the costs of storing and analyzing data will continue to skyrocket and managing these costs is paramount. 

When audits come around the SOC is on high alert and fully engaged. Most SOCs have a hand in dealing with compliance, either through documentation of processes or gathering of evidence. With Cribl, you’ll have the ability to push compliance data into cheap, long-term storage, but also retrieve it quickly with Cribl Search when asked by your auditors. 

Consider the savings of sending all that Palo Alto traffic to intelligence tiering S3 buckets instead of having to store it in Log Analytics for years with Sentinel. 

In addition to cutting technical costs, you will also be able to make better use of your people. By reducing the administrative burden of managing and monitoring the data pipelines, the security engineering staff can focus on automations or extracting insights from the data to get more business value out of the SOC.

The Next Generation SOC

As you can see, the role of data in a SOC is more vital now than ever. It’s crucial we optimize and leverage data to propel our security operations into the next generation. While operations and detection engineering are important, they are built on the foundation of effective data collection, routing, filtering, and storage. Let’s not lose sight of this fundamental process – it’s where the real magic starts.

Interested in controlling costs, increasing visibility and reducing risk? Reach out to any of our engineering folks to have a discussion about our services and how we can help you extract value from your data.