In our organization, we use our own tools such as Kyndryl Bridge and Elastic. We use Kyndryl Bridge which essentially has a similar function. It is based on Elastic. It indexes log files and flags log files. It helps you to very quickly search log files similar to the Splunk algorithm. Our clients use Splunk Enterprise Security. If somebody already has Splunk as a business intelligence tool, then very often, it makes sense to expand the Splunk subscription they have to include Enterprise Security as well. We base our decisions on customer requirements, not on anything else. If a customer comes to us looking for a SIEM solution, we advise them based on their infrastructure and objectives. If we deliver the service for them and they want us to do that, we mostly go with Microsoft Sentinel when they already do not have Splunk. Otherwise, we go with Splunk Enterprise Security. We have about 30 customers in Germany who have Splunk, and we run it for them. Monitoring multiple clouds with Splunk Enterprise Security is no more difficult than it is with Sentinel. I find Sentinel a bit easier. Splunk, of course, is very useful if you have AWS. Generically, because Splunk is not a cloud provider itself, it fits with anything. However, integration can be challenging at times, especially in virtualized environments. Splunk struggles a bit with speed in virtualized environments. Most importantly, Splunk can be outrageously expensive. That is the problem with both Splunk and Sentinel. Their pricing literally explodes based on the amount of data you feed in. I like Elastic SIEM. It is a tool that allows you to determine the price. It is based on the computing power you require and not on the amount of data you put in, so it is a lot more flexible than Splunk or Sentinel. If there is a cost concern, Elastic SIEM is a good idea. Elastic is also pretty good at creating on-premises data lakes to control the amount of information you put into the same tool. That is something that neither Splunk nor Sentinel offers. In our operations, we use a separate threat intelligence vendor. To the SIEM tool, we added a SOAR tool for security orchestration, automation, and response, which is very critical these days. We get threat intelligence from a third-party provider because neither Splunk nor Microsoft gives the coverage that our customers need. Splunk does not have a SOAR capability, so we add that on top. We could add that on top of any tool, so it is not specific to Splunk, but Splunk helps because going through the log files is very fast. It does help when you do the incident analysis. Elastic also provides that, and Sentinel has that to some degree, but Splunk is still the Google for log files. MITRE ATT&CK framework is integrated pretty much into any SIEM tool. It is not unique to Splunk. It is there in QRadar and other solutions. MITRE ATT&CK framework is helpful when designing incident response plans or playbooks. It is nice that they have it, but that is nothing unique to Splunk.
