Why SIEM and MDR Solutions Aren't Enough
After two decades architecting security operations centers for global enterprises, I've reached a conclusion that may seem controversial: our industry's heavy investment in detection and response technologies—while necessary—is fundamentally insufficient for modern security challenges.
SIEM platforms and MDR services represent the backbone of most enterprise security operations today. These technologies excel at centralized log analysis, threat detection, and coordinated incident response. But they share a critical limitation: they only activate after attackers have already gained access to your environment.
This reactive approach creates three significant challenges:
1. The Speed Gap Even the most advanced detection technologies require time to identify malicious activity—time during which attackers establish footholds, move laterally, and achieve their objectives. With the average dwell time before detection standing at 277 days, attackers have more than enough time to accomplish their goals.
2. The Coverage Gap SIEMs and MDR solutions depend on comprehensive visibility across your environment. Yet most organizations struggle to achieve visibility beyond 70-75% of their assets, creating blind spots that sophisticated attackers readily exploit.
3. The Context Gap Detection technologies excel at identifying known patterns but struggle to understand the broader context of your environment—which assets are critical, which vulnerabilities are actually exploitable, and which combinations of seemingly minor issues create major risks.
These gaps explain why organizations with substantial investments in detection technologies continue experiencing breaches. The fundamental problem isn't detection quality—it's that detection alone is insufficient.
At Albarius, we advocate for a balanced approach that combines robust detection capabilities with preemptive cyber defense. Our platform complements existing SIEM and MDR investments by:
Identifying and Eliminating Attack Paths Rather than waiting for attacks to trigger detections, we preemptively identify and eliminate the exploitable vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that enable attacks in the first place.
Validating Detection Coverage Our platform continuously tests security controls and detection capabilities against real-world attack techniques, identifying coverage gaps before attackers can exploit them.
Providing Critical Attack Context We map attack paths through your environment, helping prioritize detections based on their relationship to exploitable paths to critical assets.
One financial services customer implementing this complementary approach reduced their mean time to detect successful attacks by 76%—not by making their SIEM faster, but by eliminating 93% of exploitable attack paths to their critical assets, forcing attackers into techniques more easily detected by existing tools.
As you evaluate your security investments, consider whether you're appropriately balancing detection and prevention. The most resilient security postures combine robust detection capabilities with preemptive approaches that eliminate exploitable vulnerabilities before attacks begin.