What Is Splunk Enterprise Security?
Splunk Enterprise Security, or Splunk ES, is a SIEM (security information and event management) tool that helps organizations rapidly detect, analyze, and remediate external and internal security threats. Splunk ES provides visibility into threats in complex IT infrastructure.
Built on the Splunk Operational Intelligence Platform, it uses discovery and correlation functions to monitor, capture, and report threat data from different security systems, devices, and applications. Once the platform identifies security issues, analysts can investigate and remediate threats across access control systems, endpoints, and networks.
Using Splunk Enterprise Security as Your SIEM
Splunk Enterprise Security offers features to support out-of-the-box SIEM for various scenarios. It offers dashboards, reporting, and search capabilities, as well as security workflow management functionality and incident reviews. The solution can run on Splunk Cloud, Splunk Enterprise, or both environments and integrates with third-party threat intelligence feeds.
Security
Splunk Enterprise Security provides general-purpose security frameworks that support application security, compliance, incident management, real-time monitoring, and advanced threat detection. It lets you use pre-built correlation rules and alerts and add business context to alerts to support real-time threat monitoring, detection, and reporting.
Analytics
Splunk Enterprise Security employs machine learning, standards-based correlation, and anomaly detection to provide analytics-driven security. The solution provides visual correlations of events over time to ensure you can immediately view the details of multi-stage attacks.
Extensions
Splunkbase, a community forum dedicated to Splunk, offers over 300 out-of-the-box applications that offer pre-built reporting, visualization, and search functionality. These applications provide utilities and plug-ins to address certain use cases, including advanced threat management and next-generation firewall (NGFW).
Additionally, the Splunk Security Research Team offers support to help address advanced or new threats.
Deployment Options for Splunk Enterprise Security
Splunk Enterprise Security provides several software deployment options, including:
Single Instance Deployment
You can install Splunk Enterprise Security as a small and simple deployment on a single instance on the Splunk platform. This single instance serves as a search head and also as an indexer, while forwarders collect and send data to the instance for storing, searching, and parsing.
Single instance deployments are suitable for labs, test environments, or small systems with only one or two users working concurrently.
Distributed Search Deployments
Distributed searches let you run Splunk ES on a single, dedicated search head (or search head cluster). You can choose one of these options depending on the environment’s capacity, the Enterprise Security workload, and your running apps workload. You can deploy a search head cluster by configuring the search head to send all data to the indexers.
Splunk recommends distributed search deployments for Splunk Enterprise Security. This deployment helps improve search performance by letting you use an index cluster. It also distributes the searching data workload across several nodes. Additionally, it lets you use forwarders to gather and send data to the indexers. You can use multiple indexers to distribute the data that the forwarders collected and the processing workload across the indexers.
Cloud Deployment
Splunk Cloud Platform offers a cloud implementation of Splunk ES in varying deployment architectures depending on the data and search workload. Splunk Support offers to help customers set up, administer, and maintain this deployment.
Hybrid Search Deployment
You can deploy a hybrid search configuration by configuring an on-premise Splunk ES search head to search the indexers in a cloud environment. Splunk Cloud Platform does not support this deployment. Rather, this deployment option is open to other cloud environments. However, you need to ensure the deployment configuration accounts for bandwidth concerns and added latency, and includes adequate hardware to support your search load.
How Splunk Helps Monitor and Mitigate Threats in SAP Environments
SAP uses Splunk to help organizations understand the growing complexity of IT operations, security, and other critical enterprise functions.
As organizations undergo IT modernization processes, new requirements arise for threat detection and protection. Splunk’s partnership with SAP is focused on providing new integrations and solutions that can provide improved visibility and protection for SAP environments.
Splunk provides the following key capabilities for SAP environments:
- Real-time historical SAP telemetry data for end-to-end analysis and visualization
- Pre-built, integrated Splunk dashboards for on-premises and cloud SAP deployments
- Machine learning-based predictive analytics for SAP metrics
- Advanced troubleshooting and correlation between SAP and infrastructure data
- Proactive monitoring and attack mitigation before threats can compromise critical business data
Conclusion
In this article, I explained the basics of SAP Enterprise Security, described several deployment options for the SIEM solution, and showed how SAP ES can be used to visualize and act on metrics from SAP environments.
SAP ES is a powerful solution, but requires an effort to integrate it with existing systems and set up the relevant dashboards. Due to the partnership between SAP and Splunk, you can leverage Splunk ES with pre-configured integrations, metrics, and dashboards for critical aspects of your SAP environment. This can significantly shorten on-boarding time and help you protect critical assets faster and with lower effort.
Author Bio: Gilad David Maayan
Gilad David Maayan is a technology writer who has worked with over 150 technology companies including SAP, Imperva, Samsung NEXT, NetApp and Check Point, producing technical and thought leadership content that elucidates technical solutions for developers and IT leadership. Today he heads Agile SEO, the leading marketing agency in the technology industry.