Federated Analytics: Analyze Data Wherever It Resides for Rapid and Holistic Security Visibility

Data is everywhere, sprawling across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments. As security practitioners, we need fast access to this data to analyze it, draw insights, and uncover potential threats. However, the sheer volume of data and complexity of threats makes it difficult to maintain visibility, detect stealthy attacks, and respond quickly to security incidents. Traditional approaches often involve navigating cumbersome data silos and fail to support real-time, context-rich analysis required across these distributed environments.

As a result, four things tend to happen.

• Data visibility remains fragmented. Security operations (SecOps) teams must contend with diverse data sources across multiple platforms, making it exceedingly difficult to achieve a holistic view of security data.
• Resources are being inefficiently used and allocated for data management. This includes both human and computational resources.
• The sheer volume of data forces SecOps teams into a reactive, rather than proactive, security posture. As threat landscapes grow increasingly complex and data volumes surge, teams struggle to promptly and accurately detect and respond to threats. This reactive posture can delay critical response times and undermine the efficacy of security measures.
• Balancing data volume, accessibility, and cost remains a constant challenge. Organizations cannot simply ingest all that data into their security analytics engine due to prohibitive costs. Challenges persist in routing data to appropriate storage while maintaining on-demand access, forcing CISO’s to make difficult trade-offs between reducing operational costs and preserving security visibility and detection capabilities.

The Path to Data Federation

Splunk’s Federated Analytics premium add-on feature — deployable on Splunk Cloud Platform and Splunk Enterprise Security (cloud) — not only allows the security team to analyze data wherever it resides (in Splunk or Amazon Security Lake), but provides dynamic data movement between your data lake and Splunk. This enables your team to leverage the low cost of data lake storage and bring in select data on-demand into Splunk to accelerate detections or perform intensive drill-down searches. This approach not only preserves data integrity and reduces latency but also ensures comprehensive visibility by allowing access to—and analysis of—data across all storage locations. By leveraging Federated Analytics, organizations can conduct high-performance searches and generate responsive reporting, making the security operations process more efficient and cost-effective. This helps reduce the limitations of data silos and enables a thorough exploration of data to uncover potential threats.

For investigations involving data stored in the Amazon Security Lake, Federated Analytics enables targeted investigation and queries of only the necessary datasets, with the option to selectively pull specific datasets into Splunk for enhanced performance. This capability to perform infrequent but critical searches directly in Amazon Security Lake’s S3 is essential for ad-hoc threat hunting. To meet compliance and long-term audit needs, access the required data in your Data Lake (S3) and return results in Splunk with Federated Search for Amazon S3. This advanced analytics solution streamlines operational processes and significantly reduces IT costs by optimizing how data is queried and utilized, particularly minimizing the costs associated with searching S3 during these crucial ad-hoc investigations.

By leveraging advanced analytics and machine learning, Splunk Federated Analytics enhances an organization’s threat detection capabilities and provides actionable insights immediately available for operational use. This integration seamlessly extends the capabilities of existing Splunk deployments, allowing for real-time security management across all data environments. With Splunk Federated Analytics, organizations achieve new efficiency and agility in their security operations, ensuring rapid threat detection and response and preparing businesses to better defend against evolving threats and complex attack vectors.

The team at Amazon Web Services is especially excited about this new capability. “With Splunk's Federated Analytics now generally available, customers can analyze more logs than ever before," said Mark Terenzoni, Director of Risk Management at Amazon Web Services. “Amazon Security Lake streamlines the aggregation of security logs and provides customers the ability to retain logs in Amazon S3 for years. Federated Analytics empowers organizations to address key SOC use cases, such as monitoring and threat hunting. We are enthusiastic about our collaboration with Splunk, which enables customers to perform just-in-time indexing on large volumes of data sources without requiring data movement for investigations. Together, Federated Analytics and the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) underscore our shared vision of driving innovation and efficiency in cybersecurity.”

Splunk technology partners such as Accenture see critical benefits for clients with Federated Analytics to improve their overall security posture. “Gaining unified visibility of security data has been a challenge to clients for years,” said Tony Harris, Global Lead for Accenture’s AWS Security Business. “Cost of data ingestion and workflow inefficiencies have long precluded clients from the operational benefits of a holistic view. With Federated Analytics, clients gain an ability to see across their environment, act faster, and more efficiently than ever before.”

OK, let’s do a double click into how Federated Analytics solves problems for IT and security practitioners.

Fragmented Data Visibility… Meet a Unified View of Security Data

SecOps teams are dealing with fragmented data visibility. Data is everywhere and it’s difficult to achieve a holistic view. Splunks’ Federated Analytics consolidates these disparate data sources into a unified view, no matter where that data resides. This not only increases security data visibility but minimizes the hassle of manual data ingestion. Thus, it prevents the dangerous blind spots that compromise comprehensive security analysis.

With Federated Analytics, you get:

• A Holistic Security View: Integrate and analyze data from both Splunk and Amazon Security Lake, providing a comprehensive security overview without the hassle and the cost of relocating data.
• Real-Time Data Access: Access and analyze data in its native environment in real-time, supporting timely and informed security decision-making.
• Streamlined Data Analysis: Avoid the time-consuming and costly tasks of manually replicating and relocating data, focusing instead on efficient and centralized data analysis directly where it resides.

Inefficient Resource Usage… Meet Smart Resource Management

SecOps teams also face challenges with resource allocation, often leading to inefficient use of both human and computational resources in managing security data. Federated Analytics optimizes resource utilization by enabling precise and efficient data querying and analytics, reducing both operational costs and workload.

Federated Analytics provides you with:

• Selective Data Analysis: Fetch and analyze precisely the data needed from Amazon Security Lake and Splunk, optimizing computational resources and focusing efforts on high-value activities.
• Automated Data Processes: Federated Analytics leverages the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) to enable standardized data processes that give teams the flexibility to add, remove, and replace data sources based on their needs without having to re-architect their integration between Splunk and their data lake. This helps security teams spend more of their valuable time on strategic tasks, enhancing the speed and accuracy of threat detection and management.
• Cost Optimized for Value: Optimize operational costs with Amazon Security Lake and Splunk Federated Analytics. Implement a data tiering strategy to reduce storage and ingress/egress costs and leverage security schema standardization and cloud scalability for more cost-effective data management.

Reactive Threat Detection, Investigation, and Response… Meet Proactive Incident Management

SecOps teams often find themselves in a reactive security posture. With so much data and increasingly sophisticated threat actors, teams struggle to promptly and accurately detect and respond to threats. Federated Analytics in Splunk Enterprise Security (cloud) empowers organizations to proactively detect, investigate, and respond to threats across all stored data, even in the face of increasingly complex threat landscapes and escalating data volumes. This analytical capability enhances security operations by ensuring timely and accurate threat management.

Federated Analytics provides the following benefits:

• Advanced Threat Detection: Utilize sophisticated analytics to uncover and prioritize threats across integrated data environments. This enables SecOps teams to access the most pertinent information promptly, ensuring that threat detection is faster and more precise.
• Integrated Investigation and Response Capabilities: Streamline investigation and response actions with workflows that extend across multiple data sources for quicker analysis of threats and rapid security incident resolution. This integration ensures that the right data is accessible at the critical moment, facilitating faster decision-making and effective incident management.
• Contextual Insights and Workflows: Enhance threat detection, investigation, and response with enriched data context and integrated workflows. This approach sharpens security accuracy, minimizes blind spots, and reduces alert fatigue, providing a more transparent, broader view of security operations. Using contextual insights ensures that decisions are made based on comprehensive and relevant data, exemplifying the benefit of having the right data at the right time.

Get Started with Federated Analytics

Federated Analytics is now generally available as a premium add-on feature for Splunk Cloud Platform and Splunk Enterprise Security (cloud). To learn more about Federated Analytics, speak with your sales representative.