A Blueprint to Scale Security Operations

A Storm of Change

Digital transformation is forcing widespread changes across organizations and their security strategies. Cloud migrations, remote work, agile development - these trends necessitate new processes and systems to manage risk.

Meanwhile, the threat landscape grows more dangerous by the day. Ransomware, business email compromises, supply chain attacks, insider threats, and more present novel challenges to security teams. Organizations must rapidly adapt their defenses and operations to account for these seismic shifts.

Yet for most security teams, resources remain scarce even as responsibilities expand. Budgets strain to keep up while open positions go unfilled. Companies continue to expand their security product footprint, increasing even more the volume of alerts that require monitoring. So how can security leaders scale their operations to meet rising demands? The answer lies in leveraging new technologies that maximize human analyst productivity.

How to Do More with the Same

As infrastructure and business processes transform, old processes still need to be supported as new processes are added. This change rarely arrives with new assets or resources. New work processes mean additional work with no increase in workers. The only solution to the growing demand on you and your staff is to scale.

Fluency Security enables forward-thinking CISOs to scale security operations in the face of unrelenting change. Our cloud-native purpose-built SIEM platform amplifies security teams' capabilities, preventing overload and burnout.

With Fluency, you can handle exponentially more incidents and new attack methods without expanding headcount or infrastructure spending. Our unique streaming analytics engine acts like a force multiplier for your staff. Analysts gain superpowers to detect threats and orchestrate responses at machine speeds.

This is the only way to sustainably scale operations in a climate of constant innovation. Fluency future-proofs your security operations capabilities, enabling agility no matter how your business evolves.

Watching, Not Searching

Legacy SIEMs rely on a flawed model of data ingestion followed by searching and correlating after the fact. Using a database as the hub of analysis guarantees delays in analysis, limited investigation techniques, and higher cloud computation costs. Eventually prevention fails, then database centric designs cause delays at the moment when early detection and rapid response are critical for minimizing breaches. Once threats are inside your network, every minute counts.

Fluency’s streaming analytics watch and interrogate data as it flows into the system in real-time. There is no waiting around for batch queries to run on the backend. We identify anomalies and threats instantly, allowing your team to contain incidents swiftly before extensive damages occur. Analysis is stateful and more complex than record matching searches can perform. Streaming analytics are just that, analytics, outperforming queries while at the same scaling to volumes searches cannot handle.

This proactive approach detects risks preemptively and jumpstarts response. You gain the upper hand against attackers rather than always playing catchup. Watching beats searching when seconds matter.

Interruption Based Interaction

Another key differentiator of Fluency is interruption-driven interaction. Analysts are only notified when their expertise is truly required to handle high-priority incidents. This avoids constantly context-switching between a barrage of alerts.

Fluency’s smart automation and entity clustering ensure analysts have a manageable workload. You configure risk-based thresholds that determine what rises to the level of human intervention. Analysts can focus on cases that call for their judgment and creativity without getting bogged down in routine tasks.

This results in higher job satisfaction along with increased productivity. Analysts serve as decision-makers, not monotonous rule-followers. Their time is spent on enriching work that keeps skills sharp.

Searching Is Learning

While searching functions as detection, its true value lies in learning. Querying data to uncover new threats and opportunities allows organizations to expand their knowledge.

With its unified visibility and programming language, Fluency enables your team to easily hunt for threats across your entire environment. But more importantly, our built-in learning system continually improves detection accuracy and operational efficiency.

In addition to hunting, Fluency is useful to Tier 2 analysts who are charged with scoping and investigating an incident.

To improve and grow, we need to discover.

1. Learning from a mistake.

2. Learning from someone else's mistakes.

3. Perceiving the impact.

Analyst feedback on alerts automatically refines models to reduce false positives or informational alerts over time. New threats identified through searches can be codified into reusable detection rules. Key metrics highlight areas for enhancing processes. Runbooks and playbooks capture institutional knowledge and best practices.

This means analysts spend less time reinventing the wheel for each new incident, and more time innovating to stay a step ahead of attackers. Institutional learning pays compounding dividends over time.

Scaling Is Putting Learning Into Action

Too often, the lessons from incidents go unapplied. The same oversights occur repeatedly as employees fail to internalize past mistakes. Fluency changes the focus from one of idle searching, to interruption-based watching - Allowing staff to be productive elsewhere until their resources are needed to address a critical issue.

Fluency’s knowledge management system solves this by translating learning into action. The platform automates repetitive workflows so analysts are not burdened with rote tasks. Detected threats update rules to prevent recurrence, and metrics guide optimization efforts.

Most importantly, runbooks/playbooks encode your team’s cumulative experience into reusable incident response plans. This way, knowledge stays with the organization rather than walking out the door when an analyst leaves. Your learning is systematically operationalized to boost efficiency.

With these capabilities, Fluency allows you to scale your team’s expertise. You embed cutting-edge detection content, extensive tribal knowledge, and time-tested playbooks directly into the system. Every team member thereby gains the skills of your top talent.

Fluency kickstarts the process of scaling operations through endless learning and continuous improvement. Analysts graduate from generalists to highly specialized roles over time as workflows become automated. Your capabilities grow exponentially while costs stay flat.

The Blueprint for Limitless Security

In a climate of ever-accelerating business change, security leaders need solutions that empower their teams to scale adeptly. Fluency provides the blueprint to transform operations through streaming analytics, automation, and institutional learning.

With our cloud-native platform, your capabilities expand dynamically to address new threats and support growth. You reduce enterprise risk without inflating headcount and budgets. Analysts gain superpowers to secure the organization at machine speeds.

Scaling of process is best done with automation.

1. Fluency implements a single language that:

   1. Is initiated. Entry points are registered with the platform:

      1. Flow of Data

         1. By trigger,

         2. Time (schedule),

         3. Interaction (call. E.g., Ad hoc)

      2. Type of Data

         1. Data Store

            1. Table (Column-Row)

            2. Sets (Array of Objects)

         2. Data Stream

            1. Spontaneous

            2. Periodical (set times)

   2. Processes

      1. Queries the datastore (data at rest, such as databases) and data structure (data in use and data in motion).

         1. Data at rest – data being stored, such as databases and log files.

         2. Data in use – data that is collected from processes and services such as API calls.

         3. Data in motion – data being streamed. Streamed data is a constant flow of data whose entirety will never occur. This is event data being generated by processes and interaction.

      2. Orients (mutates) the data.

         1. Transforms: Means that it changes the values or the structure.

         2. Decorates: Adds to the structure.

         3. Clones: produces a copy of the data in memory. This allows:

            1. An immutable image to be maintained.

            2. Multiple processes to deviate future mutations.

      3. Output: Exit points are registered with the platform. Passes control onto another process

         1. Storing

            1. Reporting

            2. Datastore

         2. Analysis

            1. Release the address to another process(es).

         3. Streams. Just like entry streams but are used for output.

         4. Messages Queues

         5. Sockets

   3. Fluency Process Language (FPL) maintains structure for its use:

      1. Tables

         1. Column-row format consistent with relational databases.

      2. Streams

         1. Time Periods of data

      3. Sets

         1. Arrays of objects, consistent with big databases and API outputs.

      4. An optional presentation layer.

         1. Used to present, store, or transfer an FPL data type.

2. Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY)

3. The Platform

   1. Roles are controlled by the Platform and are related to registered components and processes. The platform determines if access is allowed.

4. Query is a major feature of observability, but it makes no sense without orientation (transformation and decoration).

To learn more about revolutionizing your security operations with Fluency, request a demo today. The future demands nothing less.