Four Signs Your Splunk-Centric Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Solution is Falling Short
by Bruce Johnson, Senior Director, Enterprise Security
Gartner estimates that by 2025, the MDR market will reach $2.15 billion in revenue, up from $1.03 billion in 2021, for a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.2% (Source: Gartner Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services, Shoard, Lawson, et. al., Gartner Report ID G00734630, October 25, 2021). More companies are investing in a managed detection and response (MDR) solution to help improve their security posture. With this growth, we are seeing clients fall into a false sense of security because they don’t know what they aren’t seeing, and they don’t realize that it could be so much better.
In this blog, we share learnings from the TekStream MSSP & MDR team, who give you four signs that your MDR solution may be lacking and outline ways you can solve this security problem. But first, how do you know what you’re missing?
Is your MDR provider giving you full protection?
As the leaders in implementing Splunk managed detection and response security solutions, the TekStream MDR team sees many customer environments not set up to get the leverage out of Splunk they were expecting. Often, they are relying on solutions that don’t ingest security data appropriately or lack the Splunk seniority to resolve onboarding issues. As a result, decisions made by the SOC (Security Operations Center) from partial views of the security threat surface are distorted, inaccurate, and lack fidelity. It’s what we know as “garbage in, garbage out.”
Are you paying for your MDR Solution twice?
We have helped other customers that were stuck with proprietary solutions using non-Splunk bolt-on applications owned by another implementation company. The old setup limited the rich features the Splunk platform offers, and they weren’t getting a return on their investment, not to mention their own data is owned by someone else. Many MDR solutions leveraging Splunk were conceived of several years ago and Splunk was relegated to a passive data store, never taking advantage of it as an enterprise security solution. The net result is that they end up paying for a SIEM solution twice, one Splunk based and the other proprietary.
Do these questions haunt you?
- Am I getting the Splunk capabilities I paid for?
- Are there real threats to my system that I miss because of unclear or missing alerts?
- Am I seeing everything I need to be seeing?
- How do I find the expertise I need – when I need it?
- Could I be paying for my SIEM solution twice?
If you’ve invested in Splunk to power your MDR, but still worry whether you are getting the security and ROI you expect, here are the four (4) signs to identify potential shortcomings.
Four Signs Your Splunk-Centric MDR Solution is Falling Short
1. You’re Not Getting the Visibility You Need
One of the most significant benefits of an MDR solution is the visibility it can provide into your organization’s security posture. This is all about how threats are surfaced, scored, and responded to.
If your MDR solution doesn’t provide the level of visibility you need, you may have these issues:
- You’re constantly chasing down alerts.
- There is a lack of enrichment to the alerts from various tiers and security appliances (I.e., simple alert echoing).
- Emerging threats don’t reveal themselves.
- You’re not receiving the information you need to make decisions or respond to threats.
To get the most out of your MDR solution, you must ensure you have visibility into all aspects of your environment, including your network, servers, applications, and data. Without this visibility, you won’t be able to detect and respond to threats effectively. You also need to ensure your solution protects all aspects of your environment, including your network, servers, applications, and data.
We often see situations where an MDR solution fails to be truly embedded across an organization’s teams, business processes, response workflows and collaboration. Are there gaps in your coverage? Do modifications to correct ingestion or alerting functionality lag? Without the ability to see all corners of your system, faults can pop up without notice, and without clear definition. If you can’t tell what an alert means and your MDR solution doesn’t show you why, then you don’t have everything you need.
2. Fidelity – data accuracy – is lacking
While visibility is what you can see, fidelity is how accurately you see it. In other words, are the threats detected relevant? The last thing you want is a poorly implemented MDR that lets you know about minor threats as often, or more often than, more significant threats. We call this alert fatigue, and it occurs when a system lets you know about threats you don’t need to worry about. It can cause you to miss the important threats in the noise. It’s important to implement a system that reduces esoteric alerts and avoids false positives and false negatives to deliver full protection from online threats.
3. You’re Not Able to Respond to Security Threats at The Speed You Need
A successful MDR solution empowers your team with the data and insights they need to respond quickly and effectively to threats. The ideal MDR setup also helps you proactively identify and address potential threats before they become serious issues.
Even better, a robust MDR solution will provide your team with automation tools that span everything from manual detection to fully automated prevention. To improve the return on your MDR investment, implement workflows and rules that prevent as many threats as possible from becoming an issue while still providing your team with the insights they need to respond manually to threats as they arrive.
4. You’re Not Getting Expert Support
One of the most significant issues our MDR team encounters is companies who do not have consistent access to experienced Splunk MDR talent and don’t have proper guidance for challenging technical issues. In fact, 68% of companies report that talent shortages directly led to the failure of one or more security projects/initiatives (Source: Splunk 2022 State of Security Report). Attracting expert talent is often difficult because skilled Splunk MDR experts can be expensive to hire and retain.
From the very outset, faulty onboarding and implementation results in a security system that isn’t incorporating the security data appropriately. When the wrong data goes into the system, then the reports and alerts you receive will be garbage. This results in decisions that are distorted, inaccurate, and lacking fidelity.
Best Technology. Best Partner. Best Solution.
If you’re not getting the visibility, coverage, accuracy or response you need from your MDR solution, then it may be falling short. But there’s no need to panic.
Here at TekStream, we’re the leader in Splunk MDR implementations. We offer a full scale of services from implementation to fully managed SOC to outsourced MDR. We have a proven track record of getting companies the full power, security, and ROI out of Splunk as quickly as possible. We typically take companies like LendingPoint and FedEx from signing to kick off in two to four weeks.
TekStream has a 100% onshore/domestic team available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The MSSP & MDR team has the knowledge and expertise to help keep your organization safe, averaging 5+ years of experience from each developer.