What is a Security Analytics Platform?

Last Updated on July 15, 2019 by Ashok Kumar

Security analytics is the process of analyzing raw data to determine the effectiveness of current security measures and take appropriate steps to improve cybersecurity. It involves the aggregation of data from a multitude of sources, including event logs, firewalls, virus scanners and more, and combining that information into an easier to process data set.

What is Security Analytics? A Definition

As mentioned above, security analytics is a method taken to analyze data with a view to implementing more productive security measures. For example, a large number of file name modifications over a very short period of time could be an indication of a ransomware attack encrypting files. Security tools are often able to recognize patterns in raw data that are indicative of cyberattacks or potential data breaches, to help you react before the impact is felt on the reputation and bottom line of the business.

What Is a Security Analytics Platform?

Security analytics platforms are an answer to the problem of collecting and analyzing huge volumes of data from multiple sources. Security analytics platforms are giving security admins a way of automating and simplifying the monitoring of proven security threat patterns and models. They allow users to get granular and customize existing threat models, setting up their own alerting and reporting mechanisms, to interpret security threats specific to their organization.

Security analytics platforms are also scalable, allowing them to work in large-scale and complex enterprise environments. Companies producing effective security analytics platforms, such as Lepide, are able to offer a better way of auditing, monitoring and alerting on user behavior and changes being made to systems and data.

What Are the Benefits of Security Analytics Platforms?

Due to the enormous volume of data from ranging sources that needs to be collected and analyzed, attempting to perform security analytics without a security tool is almost an impossible task. By automating the analysis of data through real time alerts and reports, users can speed up the detection and response to events indicative of a data breach.

Effective use of security tools often results in a more proactive security team that is able to detect and react to cybersecurity threats faster and keep data more secure.

Security analytics tools can also assist IT teams when it comes to meeting regulatory compliance. Common mandates, such as PCI-DSS and HIPAA, make it a requirement for organizations to have a way of monitoring user behavior with data and storing logs for investigative purposes. This, again, would be incredibly difficult to do effectively without the help of security tools.

The Limitations of Security Analytics Platforms

Whilst security tools themselves are often very powerful and intelligent, they are only as effective as the people using them. We’ve often seen IT and security teams deploying a security tool expecting it to be the magic bullet against data breaches.

Security tools are great at answering specific questions about your data security, but you need to know the right questions to ask. Let’s take a User and Entity Behavior Analytics tool, for example. These tools enable users to get detailed information into how their users are interacting with their data and spot anomalous activity.

It’s all well and good monitoring user behavior, but if you don’t know what kind of user behavior constitutes as worthy of further investigation, then where do you start? Ideally you should be asking yourself, why has that user copied a file containing protected health information when they have never done that in the past? Asking these kinds of questions will help you spot user behavior that could impact the security of your environment. Security tools are only effective if you are using them in an intelligent and proactive way.

The Right Security Analytics Platform for You

Security analytics platforms need to be able to analyze data and output it into actionable reports and alerts so that security teams can take the appropriate steps to improve cybersecurity. The Lepide Data Security Platform does just that. Security admins can use Lepide to see when user behavior with their most sensitive data is anomalous with detailed context. They can then use this information to take the appropriate steps to modify access controls or reverse unwanted changes.

If you would like to see how the Lepide Data Security Platform can help your organization improve security analytics, take a demo with one of our engineers today.