Written by Steven Erickson Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder Synqly, Inc.
The cybersecurity industry relies on a large ecosystem of bespoke integrations to various security tools to facilitate an integrated security ecosystem. This results in a patchwork cybersecurity ecosystem requiring a huge effort to deal with proprietary data models. The business impact of these disparate data models includes:
- Delayed threat detection and response
- Increased workload for security teams
- Higher risk of overlooking potential threats
- Inefficient use of resources and budget
The Cybersecurity Integration Landscape
Before diving into the solutions, let’s examine the current state of cybersecurity integration:
- Fragmented Ecosystems: Organizations often rely on multiple security vendors and security teams, each with its own proprietary data output.
- Manual Processes: Security analysts spend significant time manually correlating data from different sources.
- Integration Complexity: Building and maintaining integrations between various security tools is time-consuming and resource-intensive.
- Scalability Issues: As organizations grow, adding new security tools becomes increasingly challenging and costly.
As the security industry as a whole has struggled to build and maintain industry standards, Synqly and the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) offer a means of building to a standard without the cost, complexity, and lock-in that has hampered earlier standards endeavors.
The OCSF Advantage
The Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) is a collaborative effort led by industry giants like AWS, CrowdStrike, and Okta. At its core, OCSF is an open-source framework that provides a standardized schema for security-related data. Think of it as a universal translator for security tools, ensuring that data from various sources can be easily understood and processed across different products and systems.
OCSF plays a significant role in improving cybersecurity integrations. Here’s how OCSF helps:
- Standardization: OCSF provides a common language and structure for security data. This standardization makes it easier for different security tools and platforms to communicate and share information.
- Improved interoperability: By adhering to OCSF, various security products can more easily integrate and exchange data without the need for custom connectors or complex data transformations.
- Reduced complexity: OCSF simplifies the process of integrating multiple security tools by providing a unified schema, reducing the time and effort required for implementation.
- Enhanced data analysis: With a standardized format, security teams can more easily correlate and analyze data from different sources, leading to better threat detection and response.
- Faster deployment: OCSF-compliant tools can be integrated more quickly, allowing organizations to implement new security solutions with less downtime.
- Vendor-neutral approach: OCSF is an open, collaborative effort, which means it’s not tied to any specific vendor. This allows for broader adoption and compatibility across the cybersecurity industry.
- Improved automation: Standardized data formats facilitate better automation of security processes, as tools can more easily understand and act on data from various sources.
- Cost reduction: By adopting OCSF, vendors no longer need to develop custom parsers for each security tool, resulting in significant cost savings.
- Future-proofing: As more vendors adopt OCSF, it becomes easier for organizations to switch or add new tools without major integration hurdles.
OCSF in Action: Use Cases
To better understand the impact of OCSF, let’s explore some practical use cases:
- Security Information and Event Management (SIEM): OCSF standardizes log data from various sources, making it easier for SIEM solutions to ingest, correlate, and analyze security events across the entire IT infrastructure.
- Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR): OCSF-compliant data allows SOAR platforms to automate workflows and responses across multiple security tools more efficiently.
- Cloud Security: As organizations adopt multi-cloud strategies, OCSF provides a consistent way to collect and analyze security data across different cloud environments.
Synqly’s Unique Approach to Cybersecurity Integrations
Synqly offers the first Integration-as-a-Service Platform designed to address the challenges of cybersecurity integration. Our aim is to enhance security through improved communication, coordination, and integration of security tools. Here’s how Synqly stands out:
- Standard-Focused Approach: We’re committed to industry standards like OCSF and STIX, ensuring our connectors meet the highest specifications.
- Seamless Connectivity: Our platform enables security vendors to integrate with a wide range of products without burdening their engineering and product teams.
- Universal Language: By leveraging OCSF, Synqly creates a common language for security tools, facilitating effortless communication across diverse cybersecurity ecosystems.
- Scalable Architecture: Our cloud-native platform easily scales to meet the needs of growing organizations.
How Synqly and OCSF work together
Synqly harnesses the power of OCSF to transform cybersecurity integration:
- Integrate Once, Access Many: Build a single set of integrations to access all ecosystem providers within a Connector.
- Simplify and Enhance Efficiency: Eliminate complex custom integrations and data transformations, leading to faster time to market and lower operational costs.
- Data Correlation: Easily correlate data from multiple sources using our unified query language and data model.
- OCSF SDK: We provide a software development kit to help developers transition to OCSF more easily.
The Future of Cybersecurity Integration
While still in its early stages, OCSF has the potential to revolutionize the security industry. As more vendors adopt the framework, we expect to see an expansion of the schema to cover more use cases and broader adoption by security vendors. Synqly is committed to driving the OCSF evolution. While the benefits of standardized integration are clear, organizations may face challenges in adoption:
- Legacy Systems: Older security tools may not support OCSF natively. Synqly provides custom connectors to bridge this gap.
- Data Privacy Concerns: We implement robust data protection measures to ensure compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
- Skill Gap: Our comprehensive training and support will help your team quickly become proficient with the new integration paradigm.
- Resistance to Change: We work closely with stakeholders to demonstrate the tangible benefits of improved integration, easing the transition.
Discover how Synqly can empower your security operations – contact us today for a demo and take the first step towards a more integrated, efficient, and secure future.
