5 Reasons It's Time to Unify Your Tool Set

As organizations have seen their attack surfaces grow in size and complexity, the industry has responded with a multitude of new offerings built for very specific, niche use cases. It's no wonder so many security leaders talk about the need for consolidation.

Fortunately, over the last year, a new industry category has emerged called security operations platforms. By bringing together tools like security information and event management (SIEM), extended detection and response (XDR), cloud security, exposure management, and threat intelligence — all in one unified, streamlined experience — these platforms carry the potential to resolve entrenched challenges.

There are many ways an organization can benefit from such a platform. Even so, many security teams wonder if this technology can really deliver, and in any case, such an effort requires significant evaluation and organizational change.

Let's review what's in it for you, and why it might be the right time to consider how you can transform your security operations center (SOC) to protect your organization well into the future.

1. You Want to Keep Attackers From Slipping Through Undetected

While security tools operate in silos, attackers do not, and once inside, they can move laterally across your environment. This fragmented visibility increases the risk you'll miss critical information. Each tool may generate its own set of alerts and logs, creating noise, while the adversary slips through the cracks.

Unifying tools like EDR, XDR, and SIEM helps ensure that all relevant data is aggregated and correlated in one place. A unified security operations platform provides a comprehensive view of incidents, pulling together data from various sources to give you a complete picture. This enables your team to perform more efficient and effective investigations, reducing the time it takes to identify the root cause and implement corrective actions.

With a full view of an incident at your fingertips, you can make informed decisions faster and minimize the potential impact on your organization. Further, unifying all your data helps you hunt for threats more seamlessly.

2. You Are Spending Too Much Time Switching Tools

Speed is critical in cybersecurity. The ability to quickly detect, investigate, and respond to threats can make the difference between a minor incident and a devastating breach.

 A unified security platform enhances your team's ability to react swiftly to issues by reducing the amount of context switching required to take any step. This allows your team to streamline their workflows and eliminate the delays. Conversely, if your tools aren’t unified, you can miss relevant context that would help you prevent issues from further escalating.

3. You Need to Train Your Team More Quickly

One of the most significant challenges in modern security operations is the sheer volume of tools that professionals need to master. Each tool comes with its own set of features, interfaces, and intricacies. This can lead to extensive training periods and a steep learning curve for new team members, and ultimately burn out overworked security analysts.

By unifying your security operations tool set, you can streamline the training process. A consolidated platform typically offers a more intuitive and cohesive user experience, reducing the time and effort required to get up to speed. This will help the team gain value from solutions faster, giving them time to tackle more complex attacks.

4. You Want to Be More Proactive in Your Security Approach

A security operations platform can bring tools like exposure management and threat intelligence into a unified interface with detection and response capabilities. This shifts your security operations left, giving you a better view of where your vulnerabilities lie, and what emerging threats look like, before an attacker enters your system. This allows your SOC to evolve from reactive to proactive, reducing your total numbers of incidents and response time.

5. Budgets Are Tight

In today’s economic climate, many organizations are facing budget constraints. Investing in multiple security tools can be costly, both in terms of initial purchase and ongoing maintenance.

By consolidating your security operations tools, you can achieve significant cost savings. Efficiencies gained from a consolidated approach can lead reduce data ingestion costs as well as time to value and training costs, and often come at a lower total cost.

Conclusion

The advantages of a unified security operations tool set are clear. By bringing together tools like SIEM, XDR, cloud security, exposure management, and threat intelligence, you can create a more efficient, effective, and resilient security operations program.

In an era where budgets are tight and the threat landscape is constantly evolving, the ability to react quickly and efficiently to security issues is more important than ever. Now is the time to consider how tool consolidation can help you protect your organization and prepare for the future.

By Alex Klausner, Product Marketing leader at Microsoft

About the Author:

Alex Klausner is a Product Marketing leader at Microsoft, focused on transforming the SOC with innovative security solutions. She has 10+ of experience in technology, working on a variety of data, analytics, and automation solutions.