Tuning Enterprise Security assets and identities

Beyond basic searches: Why raw log analysis isn't enough

Many organizations start their security monitoring journey by searching through logs directly within the Splunk platform. It’s a powerful way to find patterns, like detecting failed login attempts. But, security teams quickly learn that these simple searches have limits:

• Too much data, too fast: Modern networks create a huge amount of event data every single day. With thousands of devices and users, it's almost impossible to keep up with new threats, and the sheer speed of data, using only manual searches.
• Connecting the dots is hard: Security incidents are rarely just one event. They often involve a series of connected actions across many different computer systems. Trying to link these separate events manually is challenging and often leads to mistakes.
• Missing the full picture (context): A log entry might say “user jsmith logged in from 192.168.1.100,” but it doesn’t explain who jsmith is, what that IP address represents, and most importantly, why this specific event matters. Without this enrichment, every security alert becomes a guess.
• A heavy maintenance burden: Keeping a large collection of custom searches and data rules updated takes time and manpower, which pulls valuable people away from actively looking for threats and fixing real problems.

These challenges highlight why a security information and event management (SIEM), like Splunk Enterprise Security (ES), is critical because it’s designed to collect, organize, connect, and analyze huge amounts of security data. Splunk ES, and its built-in Asset and Identity framework, provide the basic structure needed to correlate raw events into context-rich security findings and visualizations.

The Splunk Asset and Identity framework: Adding the missing information

The Splunk Asset and Identity framework goes beyond just identifying users and machines;. It adds vital business and operational details to your security events to help security analysts move past basic information to answer critical, and even deeper, questions, such as:

• “Who is this user? What is their role and level of importance? Are they a contractor, a director, or the CEO?"
• "What device is being accessed? What is its purpose and sensitivity? Is it a web server, a database, or a very critical production system?"
• "Should this particular person be allowed to access this specific device or resource under these circumstances?"

Reliable answers depend largely on accurate asset and identity data. Without it, useful information turns into confusion, and security alerts become indistinguishable noise.

The transformative impact: How the framework elevates your security posture

1. Enhanced event contextualization: It clarifies whether an IP address corresponds to a critical server, or whether a username denotes a high-privilege user or a standard employee. This immediate enrichment significantly reduces noise, empowering analysts to rapidly assess the true relevance and risk of an event.
2. Improved detection accuracy: Without properly tuned asset and identity data, detection rules can become overly broad, creating alert fatigue. On the other hand, critical threats might be missed entirely due to a failure to identify high-risk users or sensitive systems.
3. Facilitating risk-based alerting (RBA) and User Behavior Analytics (UeBA): Not all users and assets carry equal weight in terms of security risk. A failed login on a development test server, for instance, carries a different risk profile than one on a production payment processor. Leveraging Asset and Identity data, RBA prioritizes threats and integrates seamlessly with User Entity Behavior Analytics (UeBA) to detect anomalous internal user activities, adding another critical layer of context to risk assessments.
4. Compliance and audit readiness: Asset and Identity data provide the essential "who accessed what, when, and why" information required for defensible, audit-ready reports and directly supports principles like CIS Control No. 1, which emphasizes active asset management for continuous compliance.
5. Optimized automation and orchestration: Knowing whether a device is critical, or if a user possesses elevated privileges, allows automated systems to make smarter decisions and drives the development of automated response playbooks that adapt based on the importance of the system, or the sensitivity of the user, involved.