What is our primary use case?
My main use cases for CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM are log ingestion, security and access log ingestion, and detection engineering.
In an investigation or incident where CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM played a significant role, we had cases where in our stadium, when people come in, they bring in compromised devices, and the devices try to reach out of our internal networks to the outside, which the firewall is preventing. Because the traces are coming from various parts of the logs, some from Wi-Fi logs, some from firewall logs, and some from device logs, we needed one solution to combine the insights from all those logs to track down where it happened and who potentially the culprit could be.
The environment I'm managing within CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM is primarily on the Falcon cloud, so we don't have to deal with that. However, our environment includes on-premises, cloud, and a variety of other systems. Our on-premises infrastructure consists of a couple of sites: one is a stadium and the other one is a training ground, and we have a couple of stores. We have around a thousand employees, which means workstations and other devices. Because of migrations from different software and different tools we use, there is constant change and upgrades in the stadium. There are different devices and different sources of data we use. With all of that variety and churn, it has been easy to simply point that at CrowdStrike.
How has it helped my organization?
I can quantify improvements in detection, investigation, or response times since deploying CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM. The biggest improvement when we switched from a legacy SIEM solution to CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM was the improvement in speed and how much faster the queries and searches were happening. That allowed for improved time to detection and response in general. CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM, at the moment, allows us to get everything from different data sources into the same place and allows us to automate in a more confident way. It has considerably improved over the years I've been using it and has become better with Fusion Workflows. There are more integrations happening that allow us to deploy responses across different platforms. For example, if there's an indication of a phishing campaign happening, the moment we see it happening, we have a workflow that automates responses and gives us more insight into what's happening and notifies people that need to know as an automated workflow. That has been very useful.
If I estimate in percentage or hours how much faster it is compared to my legacy SIEM, I'd say we got a 75 percent improved speed just from remembering the queries we compared across. When we moved from the legacy SIEM to CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM, we translated the queries from the previous query language we used into the CrowdStrike query language. We just compared the run speeds to the previous one, and that was a 75 percent improvement then. At the moment, we're not really comparing because we know we're working with a very fast solution. It's not something we pay attention to now, but for the period when we migrated a couple of years ago, that was a very stark improvement. It allowed us to reduce the times. In the previous legacy SIEM, we had to give it five minutes for the log ingestion. Once the logs are ingested, then the way automations go, we give it five minutes to think about it. For CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM, we reduced that to two minutes when we converted the workflows. It has become even faster now too.
CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM has definitely changed the speed at which my team searches, investigates, and responds to security events because of how fast the parsing happens and how fast the searches happen. It allows us to do things faster. I can't really put a number on it because we have not tried to estimate it after we first moved. We saw the improvement was considerable. After that, we just think about what time we need to give it to think. It's the new normal, so it's hard to say. It definitely has not been getting worse. I can feel that.
The automations within CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM have changed the work my SOC analysts perform day-to-day by allowing us to reduce the number of tickets the SOC is dealing with. After we have identified the consistent sources of false positives or benign true positives, they're easy to identify. The automation can handle them, triage them, classify them, and close them without involving the human in the loop. That means the SOC now only pays attention to the real threats and the real false positive tickets where human attention is required. We still use automation to enrich those and provide more context, but it has definitely allowed us to reduce the volume of tickets the SOC looks at. We are now confident that many of the false positives and the items that just don't need human attention anymore don't get it, and our SOC analysts can look at the real cases now.
We have reduced our ticket volume due to automations in the 90th percentile.
We have been able to consolidate SOAR or other SOC tools within CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM. Once we moved our workflows and logic from legacy SIEM into CrowdStrike, we've been doing optimization, improvement, and cutting items where necessary. That's more a part of the process of optimizing and upgrading things and seeing the new features that have been coming out in Falcon and in general in CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM. This has also allowed us to improve that. Especially now that the Falcon AIs are available, we can use them with custom detections and expanded capabilities. It's not only targeting the Falcon detection but also allows for part of the detections. That has also improved, so there's a lot more synergy now going on.
What is most valuable?
The impact of CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM on my alert volume, false positives, or analyst workflow is not a simple answer because it's more related to what kind of logs we ingest, how we process them, and whether we enrich them. Often enough, it depends on the log source. For example, some firewalls we onboarded trigger a lot more detections. But once we see that certain event codes should not be a detection, we just disable them as a detection. It's a work in progress, but CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM is very easy to configure in that way. We can say that for this log source, we don't make detections, and we're going to use custom integrated workflows. If this query finds something, it's going to make a detection based on the logs we have. We have the ability to customize what's going to become a detection, how it's going to be detected, and the ability to combine different detections into a case. That flexibility has allowed us to use it in more depth to correlate different types of logs and combine all of that into one case instead of it being dispersed into 10 different detections.
The integration of CrowdStrike Falcon telemetry with other security data sources within the SIEM makes things easier. There are a lot of predefined data sources we can ingest, but there's also an ability to customize it ourselves. We can use the parsers that are provided, but also if it's a more complicated or less useful data source, we can make a custom parser. That allows us to customize how the data is coming in and how it connects with others. It also allows us to do some filtering and transformation. Once we started using the CrowdStrike data format, we just started to make sure everything comes in the same format. That way, the queries are more transferable. Just following the same CrowdStrike parsing standard and applying it to our different data sources, even less usual ones, has allowed us to standardize everything and make it seamlessly connect with each other.
We are using Charlotte AI and other capabilities within CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM, and we added AI triage to the detections. Not only does the person look at them, but an AI also gives a quick review of what it thinks it is and an additional opinion. When a person looks at the case, there's already more context and more enrichment with an AI's opinion. We use both Charlotte AI and some of our internal models for that. That has been very useful for the CrowdStrike feature where we can bring our own models and our own capabilities into that.
What needs improvement?
CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM can be improved with the Fusion Workflow. Some integrations, specifically APIs, could be improved because there are so many different formats, so it's not consistent. Sometimes the Falcon UI does not agree with what's in practice. It could be made a bit more flexible. The Fusion Workflow, especially with the API calls and integrations with third parties, is the area for improvement. When they work, they work seamlessly and perfectly. But when it doesn't, it creates an extra layer of complexity that shouldn't be there. That's the biggest way to improve it at the moment.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM for most of my time, considerably more in the last year. I have been using it daily now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I would assess the stability and reliability of CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM as excellent because so far, we have had no issues. It has always been stable and reliable. Any issues we could usually trace down to our own internet connection rather than the SIEM itself. For example, I'm looking at the SIEM through a Wi-Fi connection, and the slow connection's fault rather than the SIEM's fault is the cause. We have never had issues with reliability or it being down or unavailable, or unreasonably long search times. We haven't really encountered those yet.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I would evaluate the scalability of CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM by saying the trickiest part is just to make sure only what we need is going to the SIEM. Because there are many different log sources, if we just point all the firewall logs, it's not a good practice. We had to come up with some filtering solutions. But once we know what we want and how we want it, there have never been issues with the SIEM side. It's just making sure we're sending what has to be sent there. While also complying with different requirements, we have to maintain a full log copy for long storage or hot storage for a year for forensics and other needs. There are different considerations, but once we send everything we want and need to the SIEM, it scales easily and does what we want it to do.
How are customer service and support?
I would evaluate CrowdStrike's support as reasonably fast when we have used them. Most of the time, we get answers to our questions or we get pointed to the people who have the answers. We've used both the support and subject matter experts from CrowdStrike to answer our questions. So far, we've had a good experience and nothing really to complain about.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
The legacy SIEM I used before was Splunk.
The circumstances or factors that prompted my company to explore new SIEM solutions were the migration from the legacy SIEM. Basically, it was becoming too big, too slow, too hard to manage, and too overcomplicated. CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM allowed us to simplify many things that should not have been an issue in the first place.
How was the initial setup?
I would describe my experience with deploying CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM as very fast and very efficient. Part of it is because CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM is already a managed platform, so we didn't really have to deal with installing it or tuning it. That's handled by CrowdStrike. The management overhead we had to deal with in the legacy SIEM was gone. That was the main advantage.
What other advice do I have?
Our main cloud provider is Google with a bit of AWS.
I would rate CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM an eight and a half or nine. It's not perfect, but it's the best I have used so far.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Google