Analytics and intelligence being used, but not effectively

BETHESDA, USA: SANS announced the results of it's first-ever survey on awareness and use of analytics and intelligence to augment current monitoring practices.

In it, only 10 percent of respondents felt confident in their organization's ability to analyze large data sets for security trends, although 77 percent are collecting logs and monitoring data from various systems and security devices.

"Respondents are trying to add intelligence and improve analytics of the security data they're collecting, but they're struggling in various ways," says Deb Radcliff, executive editor of the SANS Analyst Program. "The primary issue is they're not able to make the associations to detect security events among their event and log data."

The survey had 647 respondents and was cosponsored by Guidance Software, Hewlett-Packard, Hexis Cyber Solutions (a KeyW Company), LogRhythym and SolarWinds. This survey is a follow-up to the SANS Eighth Annual Log Management Survey, which revealed that organizations were falling behind in their ability to detect security threats because they were -- quite literally -- gathering too much information to sift through.

This new survey on analytics and intelligence indicates that most organizations are still relying heavily on their Log Management (49 percent) or SIEM Platforms (47 percent), while only 17 percent are making use of advanced threat intelligence and profiling databases.

"While most security operations teams are still relying on traditional SIEM and log management, there are new challenges facing many organizations that these products may not address," says senior SANS analyst Dave Shackleford, who authored the report. "More scalable and flexible analytics platforms are gaining interest and attention from the security community, and will likely continue to do so; given the threats and attacks we face today."