Allison Fiedler
It’s easy to get caught up in the hive mentality, and it happens more than you think when purchasing cybersecurity products and services.
Recently, the Federal Trade Commission has been launching investigations into anticompetitive practices related to the cybersecurity industry. Anti-competitive practices can result in cybersecurity tools that don’t interoperate or are cost-prohibitive to do so-- keeping you “locked-in” to that particular vendor. It’s time to break out of the hive mentality to build the security that enterprises deserve.
What is vendor lock-in?
Vendor lock-in is when a customer becomes dependent or over-reliant on a specific vendor’s product or services, making it difficult to break up or diversify from that vendor difficult. This can happen when vendors create proprietary tools, systems, and products that deviate from open-source resources or industry standards. This makes the product incompatible with others and expertise in that product less transferable. Usually, the longer one is “locked-in,” the more challenging and expensive it becomes to transition away from that vendor.
Security teams should invest in tools that are compatible with a variety of product ecosystems across a variety of vendors and that can derive meaning and insights from across vendors.
How can DataBee help you avoid vendor lock-in?
DataBee’s cloud-native security and compliance data fabric offers users a vendor-agnostic solution that can extract data from various sources and transform it into the desired format to support continuous compliance, SIEM de-coupling, simple & advanced threat hunting, and behavioral baselines with anomaly detection.
We offer customers the freedom to leverage:
- Data lakes and data sources of choice: DataBee offers an extensive list of supported data sources (250+ and counting) and data lakes, and the list is constantly expanding. Bring in data from disparate sources, and DataBee will serve as the glue to piece it all together. The data flows through DataBee, without needing it to be stored, entering our product as a raw event and exiting as a normalized and enriched full time-series dataset into your data storage solution of choice. There is no holding data hostage.
- Visibility and compatibility across cloud, hybrid, and on-prem solutions: DataBee centralizes insights for all your data sources regardless of where they sit in your security architecture, enabling customers to extract more value from what they already have.
- Data normalization via the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF): OCSF is an implementation-agnostic, open-source framework used for data normalization and standardization. Data normalization helps ensure that your information all speaks the same language, is stored only once, and is updated consistently throughout your database. This makes it easier for DataBee to correlate data, reduce redundancies, and derive insights with reliable results.
- Sigma Formatted Rules for Streaming Detections: DataBee’s active detection streams apply Sigma formatted rules over OCSF-normalized security data while en route to their storage destination. This enables DataBee active detections to integrate into a given existing security ecosystem with minimal customizations. Sigma rules provide a standardized syntax for defining detection logic, enabling security professionals to comprehensively define parameters for identifying potential security incidents. With Sigma-formatted detections leveraging OCSF in DataBee, organizations can swap out security vendors without needing to update log parsers or security detection content.
What are the benefits of a vendor-agnostic approach?
- Interoperability, scalability, and flexibility: DataBee brings together disparate and diverse systems under one roof. This enables you to future-proof your organization: Freely expand and evolve by adding or removing systems without impacting your compatibility with DataBee. Scale to up to 10,000 streaming detections applied to petabytes of data a day in near real-time without requiring an overhaul of your infrastructure.
- Value-based purchasing: Being vendor agnostic allows you to choose the products that are the best for your needs and the best in the industry, allowing you to adopt tools that are “best-of-breed.” It also gives your employees exposure to industry-standard skills, tools, and techniques that will be transferable across a variety of products.
- Cost-effectiveness: Over-reliance on a single product suite or vendor can be expensive. It can make pricing and contracts less competitive. It can also make deriving insights across systems more challenging if your systems do not play well with each other, requiring more time and resources to come to the same conclusion. Being vendor-agnostic enables you to maximize the value of the products you pay for while managing costs across all your systems.
- Heightened visibility and control: Centralized monitoring across a variety of solutions. Allows you to make more intentional choices about the vendors you select and how you integrate them into your cybersecurity infrastructure. Some vendors may see what others do not, increasing the likelihood of a faster response.
- Stronger security: Vendor agnosticism reduces overreliance on a single vendor to provide and maintain your suite of products. Vendor lock-in can consolidate your resources, leading to a smaller attack surface or even a single point of failure. In the event of a security breach or outage, having many vendors can reduce your total attack surface and negative impacts on business operations.
Ready to break the hive mentality and empower your organization with a flexible, resilient security strategy? Request a custom demo to learn how DataBee can fast-track your transition to vendor-agnostic.
