Black Hat 2024: SIEMs Transformed by Customer Needs, Vendor Consolidation

Greater affordability, better efficiency, lower cost of operations — these are the customer criticisms of security incident and event management (SIEM) systems that Saryu Nayyar, CEO of Gurucul, thinks her company has solved, boosting enterprise security in the process. In her remarks at the Dark Reading News Desk at Black Hat USA, Nayyar points to Gurucul's recently introduced data optimizer capability, which she says is helping companies reduce their data volume by 50%. "Anybody who's not thinking in those terms is missing out because now you have an option to reduce that cost and tackle that pain point."

Many SIEM vendors have been slow to respond to customers, Nayyar adds. Her competitors have failed to listen, solve real problems, or build more solid platforms, she charges.

And that point of view was echoed by Nedra Pitt, CISO for home goods retailer Belk, who joins Nayyar for this News Desk conversation. Pitt confirms that Gurucul's data optimizer gives her department and organization more budgeting flexibility. Being able to optimize my data and drive down that path is a game changer," she says. "I can eliminate 50% of my data that I don't need to store — it's duplicative."

Nayyar enumerates other savings from SIEMs. "The highest ROI from the AI application in SecOps is where we've seen a ton of success — making the analyst experience better, cutting down the time for investigation is powerful." She says using AI for adversarial techniques for detection has had a positive impact. The UI- UX experience, or how customers interact with the platform, also delivers substantial time savings.

Saryu Nayyar is an internationally recognized cybersecurity expert, author, speaker and member of the Forbes Technology Council. She has more than 15 years of experience in the information security, identity and access management, IT risk and compliance, and security risk management sectors. She was named EY Entrepreneurial Winning Women in 2017. She has held leadership roles in security products and services strategy at Oracle, Simeio, Sun Microsystems, Vaau (acquired by Sun), and Disney. Saryu also spent several years in senior positions at the technology security and risk management practice of Ernst & Young. She is passionate about building disruptive technologies and has several patents pending for behavior analytics, anomaly detection, and dynamic risk scoring inventions.

In addition to being CISO for home furnishings retailer Belk, Neda Pitt has a track record of more than 22 years of experience modernizing vital IT systems and optimizing organizations in contemporary security management disciplines. She is an advocate for innovative information security and risk management practices that enable digital transformation and improve business KPIs.