Introduction to data onboarding

Data onboarding deals with collecting, normalizing, and enriching data for use in security information and event management (SIEM) systems. Proper data onboarding is vital for a SIEM system to be efficient in monitoring, investigating, and responding to anomalous activity, especially given the potentially large volume of security log data.

In this post, we’ll cover what data onboarding involves. We’ll look at some challenges and consider the significance of data onboarding in relation to next-generation SIEM technologies.

What is data onboarding?

In a general sense, data onboarding is the systematic process of importing, processing, and integrating data into a new system. The focus of this article is on cybersecurity, so we’ll consider data onboarding specifically as it relates to preparing and integrating data from various sources into a SIEM system.

Core objectives

The core objectives of data onboarding are:

• Integration: Incorporating diverse data types from multiple sources into the SIEM system.
• Normalization: Converting data to a common format so that it is consistent and easier to analyze.
• Enrichment: Adding helpful context to data — such as threat intelligence — to enhance its usefulness for security analysis.

Process and life cycle

Data onboarding involves several key processes chained together:

1. Collection: Gathering data from various sources. Sources might include network devices, servers, applications, and more.

2. Validation: Ensuring the collected data is accurate and complete.

3. Transformation: Modifying the data to fit the SIEM system’s operational requirements. This may involve reformatting or cleansing the data.

4. Integration: Loading the processed data into the SIEM for use in its continuous security monitoring and response efforts.

Challenges of data onboarding

The core objectives and processes in data onboarding are straightforward. However, most enterprises encounter common challenges. Let’s examine each one more closely.

Volume

Handling massive amounts of log data is a significant challenge. As your organization generates data from various sources — such as network devices, servers, applications, and endpoints — it’s possible for the volume of daily data to reach terabytes or more. How will you efficiently process and store this data without losing critical information along the way? Solving this problem is essential for maintaining effective security operations.

Velocity

Security log data in modern applications can be generated at incredible speeds, as application and infrastructure components constantly generate data that might be useful to a SIEM's operations. However, because data is generated quickly, processing it can create bottlenecks.

Real-time data processing is essential for swiftly detecting and responding to incidents. Delays in data collection and validation may lead to missed threats and slower response times, compromising your security posture.

Variety

Security data also comes in many formats. Databases may generate structured data, and logs may have semi-structured data. Meanwhile, emails and documents may contain unstructured data. Each data type requires a different processing technique for proper integration into a SIEM system. Standardizing this diverse data to ensure accurate analysis and correlation is the central challenge. 

Veracity

Finally, we must consider the challenge of ensuring accuracy and integrity in your incoming data. Inaccurate or incomplete data may lead to false positives, which waste resources as you run down non-events or missed detections. All this can lead to threats slipping through unnoticed. 

Addressing these challenges will be essential for your organization to have effective data onboarding and leverage your SIEM system fully.

Data onboarding in the context of cybersecurity

Security data onboarding includes certain specific needs that are unique to cybersecurity, which include the following:

• Relevance to security: Onboard only pertinent security data to focus on genuine threats.
• Timeliness: Data must be available in real time for immediate threat detection.
• Integrity: Data integrity must be maintained, and sensitive information must be protected.

Data onboarding plays a crucial role in threat detection and response. Fortunately, built-in integrations with key data can help streamline the data onboarding process, reducing both cost and complexity. Direct integration of key data (endpoints, cloud environments, and identity) into the SIEM platform can help eliminate the need to route this data to a separate platform or pay to ingest and store this data twice.

Effective cybersecurity depends on real-time processing of security data. When deciding on a SIEM solution — and your subsequent data onboarding strategy — look to minimize latency so that you can have faster data processing and real-time threat detection. An index-free architecture, like that of CrowdStrike Falcon® Next-Gen SIEM, can provide this.

Data enrichment is also important, as adding threat intelligence context can dramatically simplify threat hunting and investigation. This will make your data more actionable for security analysts.

Next-gen SIEM and data onboarding

Next-gen SIEM technology takes traditional SIEM capabilities to the next level, bringing real-time processing, advanced analytics, and AI-driven threat detection. Next-gen SIEMs can handle large data volumes efficiently, providing faster and more accurate threat detection and response.

With data onboarding as crucial as it is, CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM streamlines the data onboarding process with preconfigured integrations and automated data normalization. Organizations can ensure efficient collection, normalization, and enrichment of diverse data nearly right out of the box.

Effective data onboarding for Falcon Next-Gen SIEM

Effective data onboarding is crucial for robust cybersecurity, enabling efficient monitoring, detection, investigation, and response. Next-gen SIEM technologies like Falcon Next-Gen SIEM simplify and enhance this process with real-time processing and advanced analytics.

Falcon Next-Gen SIEM, along with CrowdStrike® CrowdStream, revolutionizes data onboarding for security engineers. These tools provide preconfigured integrations and automated data normalization, eliminating the need for complex setups and reducing latency. Security engineers benefit from a turnkey setup, seamless data integration, and real-time visibility, allowing them to focus on threat detection and response rather than managing data pipelines​.

Using advanced data onboarding solutions in SIEM systems offers significant benefits, including enhanced security posture, operational efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. Learn more about how Falcon Next-Gen SIEM can transform your security operations.