This is part I of a series exploring the concepts and potential of Federated Security. See more.

Security operations teams have faced persistent challenges with data for decades. Every day, analysts and engineers grapple with massive volumes of security data scattered across numerous tools, clouds, and environments. Despite significant effort and investment, fully centralizing this data has proven elusive – often leaving teams frustrated, overworked, and lacking visibility.

We believe there’s a better way. In this series, we’re introducing Federated Security – a practical, scalable, and effective approach to managing security data without the painful costs and complexity of full centralization.

Long-Standing Challenges in Security Operations

Today’s security teams rely on numerous products, each generating vast amounts of data. Unfortunately, this data typically lives isolated in different formats, different tools, and different locations. The traditional solution of centralizing this data before operational use rarely succeeds fully. Due to economic, technical, and operational constraints, vital data often remains stranded, unusable precisely when it’s needed most.

The Problem with the Status Quo: Centralization Isn’t Working

The current approach typically involves attempting to duplicate and move security data into centralized locations like Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms or cloud-based storage solutions such as data lakes or warehouses. Yet centralization faces significant hurdles:

  • High costs of ingestion, storage, and infrastructure maintenance.
  • Complex and fragile data pipelines.
  • Significant data duplication and constant movement.

Even after substantial investment, security teams rarely manage to centralize ALL the relevant data they need. The resulting data gaps represent blind spots and create operational inefficiencies, hampering effective threat detection, investigation, and response.

Introducing Federated Security: A Better Way

Federated Security is not a product – it’s a strategic approach. 

It integrates diverse security controls and the data they generate into a cohesive, interoperable framework. Crucially, it achieves centralized visibility and usability without the high cost and complexity associated with traditional centralization.

The principles of Federated Security include:

  • Integration: Connecting directly to data sources where they reside, rather than requiring data movement.
  • Interoperability: Querying and analyzing distributed data across multiple tools seamlessly.
  • Centralized visibility: Achieving unified insights without duplicating or moving massive amounts of data.

Federation Isn’t New, But Federated Security Is

Federation concepts have long been successful in IT operations – early examples include federated databases in the 1980s, federated identity management in the 2000s, and federated search technologies more recently. Federated Security builds upon these proven approaches, extending them specifically to solve the contemporary challenges of cybersecurity data management.

Practical Capabilities of Federated Security

Federated Security offers tangible capabilities that directly address the challenges security practitioners face:

  • Federated Search: Analysts and investigators query multiple, diverse, distributed data sources in real-time, eliminating delays and blind spots.
  • Federated Analytics: Teams perform analytics directly on live, decentralized data, significantly reducing latency, cost, and complexity traditionally associated with data pipelines and ETL processes.
  • Federated Detections: Detection engineers and threat hunters write and execute detection logic seamlessly across multiple data sources without data duplication, accelerating threat identification and response.

It’s important to note that Federated Security does not necessarily eliminate the need to move data – rather, it optimizes it. Data mobility still has a valuable place, but instead of the traditional assumption that all data must be duplicated and moved, Federated Security supports moving data only selectively and strategically, based on specific, targeted use cases.

Real-World Impact: Why Practitioners Should Care

Federated Security is not just theoretical – it’s already proving its value:

  • Faster, more comprehensive investigations and threat hunting – real-time queries across distributed data sources drastically improve response times.
  • Cost reductions – teams leveraging Federated Security significantly lower their storage and ingestion costs.
  • Immediate operational benefits – faster onboarding of new data sources and simpler operational workflows without extensive engineering or professional services.

Federated Security: The Name Matters Less Than the Approach

In the industry, you might hear similar concepts referred to by various names: Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture (CSMA), Security Mesh, Security Fabric, or Security Data Mesh. Frankly, the specific terminology isn’t as important to us as the core idea. Rather than focusing on labels, we’re encouraging security teams and practitioners to reconsider the long-held assumption that they must centralize all security data. The name doesn’t matter nearly as much as consideration of the benefits of adopting a practical, federated approach.

Conclusion

Federated Security offers security operations teams immediate, material benefits: cost-effectiveness, operational efficiency, and better security outcomes, all achieved without forced data centralization. In upcoming posts, we’ll dive deeper into specific applications of Federated Security, including investigations & threat hunting, integrations with platforms like Splunk, and modern security data architectures.

The future of effective security operations is Federated and it’s here now.