Mastering Your Domain: A CISO’s Guide to Self-Assessing Your Security Data Operations, Phase 1 – Discovery

After more than 30 years on the front lines of cybersecurity—from the trenches of incident response in Fortune 100 companies to the strategy rooms of Big 4 consulting and the CISO’s office—I’ve seen the industry evolve at a dizzying pace. But one truth has become more profound with each passing year: The modern Security Operations Center (SOC) has a data problem.

Your ability to detect, investigate, and respond to threats is no longer just about having the best analysts or the most expensive tools. It’s about how well you manage, access, and utilize your data. This is the core principle of Security Data Operations (SecDataOps), and it’s the critical link that turns a reactive, overwhelmed SOC into a proactive, efficient cyber defense powerhouse.

This blog is the first in a series designed to give you an open-source roadmap to assess and mature your own SecDataOps posture. We’re starting where every successful transformation begins: Phase 1, Discovery.

Background: Why a SecDataOps Assessment is Non-Negotiable

For decades, the answer to every new threat was a new tool. This led to a sprawling, siloed, and staggeringly expensive security stack. Each new box or agent generated its own unique data stream, promising visibility but often delivering a torrent of alerts that overwhelmed teams.

The result? A recent SANS Institute survey found that more than 40% of security leaders report declining tenure for SOC personnel. Analysts are burning out. They spend their days chasing ghosts across a dozen different screens, manually correlating data, and fighting their tools more than the adversary. This isn’t just an HR problem; it’s a critical operational risk. The 2024 Verizon DBIR highlights that the “human element” remains a factor in 68% of breaches. When your human element is exhausted and inefficient, your risk skyrockets.

Now, inject Generative AI into this equation. AI is the single greatest force multiplier for security operations in a generation. It promises to automate triage, accelerate investigations, and predict attacks before they happen. A 2025 Darktrace State of AI Cybersecurity report revealed that 95% of security leaders agree that AI can significantly improve the speed and efficiency of their defenses.

But here is the hard truth I’ve learned from leading enterprise security teams: Your AI is only as good as your data strategy.

If your data is messy, incomplete, siloed, or inaccessible, your AI will be, at best, ineffective and, at worst, dangerously misleading. It will churn out false positives, miss critical context, and fail to deliver on its transformative promise.

This is the “WHY” of SecDataOps. It’s about building the foundational data layer that not only empowers your human analysts but also unlocks the true potential of AI. It’s about transforming your security data from a cost center—a swamp of logs you’re forced to retain—into your single most valuable strategic asset.

A SecDataOps self-assessment allows you to systematically understand where you are today so you can build a realistic, data-driven roadmap to where you need to be. It all starts with Discovery.

Phase 1: Discovery – Charting Your Known World

The goal of the Discovery phase is to build a comprehensive, shared understanding of your current state. It’s not about fixing things (yet). It’s about listening, learning, and documenting reality. The Discovery phase can be broken down into three fundamental steps. For each step, we’ll explore the “What,” “So What,” and “Now What.”

Step 1: Strategic Goals and Objectives

What is it?

This is the “mission briefing.” It’s a series of structured conversations with executive and senior leadership to understand the business and security objectives that will drive your SecDataOps transformation. This isn’t a technical deep dive; it’s a strategic alignment exercise. You are trying to answer the fundamental question: “What problems are we trying to solve, and what does success look like?”

So What?

In my experience, this is the most frequently skipped—and most fatal—omission. Without clear strategic alignment, your project is adrift. You might build a technically elegant solution that solves the wrong problem. You’ll struggle for budget, face organizational resistance, and ultimately fail to demonstrate value.

By starting here, you connect your SecDataOps initiative to tangible business outcomes. Are you trying to:

• Reduce Costs? Maybe your SIEM ingestion and storage costs are spiraling out of control. A key metric might be reducing data sent to expensive “hot” storage by 40% without losing visibility.
• Improve Efficiency? Perhaps your Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) is too high. The goal is to reduce it by 50% by giving analysts unified access to data.
• Enable a New Capability? You might want to build a formal threat-hunting program, which requires long-term data retention and powerful analytics across diverse data sources.
• Prepare for AI? The objective could be to create a clean, structured, and enriched data lake to serve as the foundation for a new security AI platform.

Defining these goals upfront gives you a “North Star.” Every subsequent decision in your assessment can be measured against it.

Now What? (Your Roadmap)

1. Identify Key Stakeholders: Schedule time with the CISO, the Head of the SOC, the Head of Security Engineering, and, critically, your counterparts in IT and Data/Platform Engineering. As seen in real-world workshops, cultural and organizational issues around logging extend far beyond security.
2. Ask Guiding Questions:

• What are the top 3 business risks the security organization is tasked with mitigating?
• What is the biggest pain point in our security operations today (cost, speed, visibility, etc.)?
• If we had a magic wand, what one thing would you change about how we use data for security?
• How do we currently measure the success of our security operations? Are those metrics effective?
• What is our organizational stance on adopting AI in the SOC? Are there active projects or mandates?

3. Document the Vision: Synthesize the answers into a concise mission statement. For example: “Our goal is to reduce our security data TCO by 30% over 18 months while cutting our incident investigation time in half. We will achieve this by federating search across our SIEM and cloud data lake, and by automating Level 1 alert triage with an AI-driven workflow.” This statement becomes your mandate.

Step 2: Operational Interviews

What is it?

If Step 1 was the view from 30,000 feet, this is ground level. This step involves talking to the practitioners—the SOC analysts, threat hunters, detection engineers, and incident responders. The goal is to understand their day-to-day reality, their workflows, their tools, and, most importantly, their frustrations. This is where you “shadow live incident investigations to identify pain points and inefficiencies.”

So What?

This is where you discover the “ground truth.” Executive vision is essential, but it can often be disconnected from the operational friction that grinds productivity to a halt. In countless engagements, I’ve seen leaders who believe their tooling is state-of-the-art, only to discover their analysts are still piping grep commands in a terminal because the UI is too slow or lacks context.

These interviews uncover gems of information you won’t find in any official document, such as:

• Data Gaps: “We can’t investigate cloud incidents effectively because the EKS control plane logs aren’t being sent to our SIEM yet.”
• Tool Friction: “To investigate one alert, I have to open my SIEM, the EDR console, a threat intel portal, and our internal asset manager, then manually copy-paste IOCs between them.”
• Tribal Knowledge: Key investigation processes that exist only in the heads of a few senior analysts.
• Real-World Metrics: How long does it really take to close an alert? Not what the dashboard says.

This step builds empathy and trust. By listening intently to your team’s grievances, you show them you’re there to help, not to audit.

Now What? (Your Roadmap)

1. Identify the Practitioners: Schedule interviews with representatives from every key function:

• SOC Triage (L1/L2 Analysts)
• Incident Response (L3 Analysts)
• Threat Hunting
• Detection Engineering
• Security Engineering / Tool Administrators

2. Use a Structured Approach: Don’t just have a casual chat. Use a questionnaire to guide the conversation and ensure you cover the same ground with everyone. Your goal is to understand the workflow for their top 3-5 most common tasks (e.g., triage a phishing alert, investigate a malware detection, hunt for credential abuse).
3. Ask “How” and “Why”:

• “Walk me through, step-by-step, how you investigate [X type of] alert.”
• “What is the first piece of data you need? Where do you get it?”
• “What is the second piece? Where is that?”
• “What data do you wish you had access to that you don’t?”
• “Which of your tools do you love? Which do you hate, and why?”
• “If you could stop paying for one data source to free up budget, what would it be?”

4. Listen and Document: Capture the pain points. Note the specific tools, log sources, and queries they mention. This qualitative data is just as important as the quantitative data you’ll gather in the next step. Remember the wisdom from the self-assessment guide: People can be wrong! Trust but verify. One analyst’s frustration might be another’s favorite feature. Look for patterns.

Step 3: Documentation Gathering

What is it?

This is the artifact collection phase. You’ve heard the strategic vision and the operational reality; now it’s time to gather the hard evidence. This means collecting existing documentation and, more importantly, creating documentation where it doesn’t exist.

So What?

Documentation provides the objective backbone for your assessment. It allows you to validate what you’ve heard in interviews and build a factual baseline of your environment. An architecture diagram shows you how data should flow, while logs and metrics show you how it actually flows.

Critically, you must take note of the absence of documentation. A missing data flow diagram, an outdated SOP, or a non-existent data retention policy are all significant findings. They point to operational immaturity and are often the root cause of the friction your analysts described.

Now What? (Your Roadmap)

1. Build a Document Inventory: Create a central repository and start collecting. Your target list should include:

• Architecture Diagrams: Network diagrams, cloud architecture diagrams, and security tool deployment diagrams.
• Data Flow Maps: Visual representations of how data moves from a source (e.g., a firewall) to its destination (e.g., a SIEM index).
• Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs): How-to guides for common analyst tasks.
• Tool Configuration Reports: Exports from your SIEM, EDR, and other major tools showing what data is being collected, how it’s parsed, and what the retention periods are.
• Cost & Usage Reports: Billing information from your SIEM and cloud providers. How much are you paying for ingestion and storage?

2. Create a Log Source Inventory: This is your single most important artifact. For every single data source you collect for security, you need to know:

• Source Name: (e.g., Palo Alto Firewall, CrowdStrike EDR, AWS CloudTrail)
• Data Type: (e.g., Threat Logs, Process Events, API Calls)
• Destination: (e.g., Splunk, S3 Cold Storage, Humio)
• Volume: (Events Per Second / Gigabytes Per Day)
• Cost: (Ingestion & Storage)
• Retention Period: (e.g., 90 days hot, 1 year cold)
• Primary Use Case: (e.g., Compliance, Threat Hunting, Triage)
• Owner: (Who is responsible for this data source?)

3. Fill the Gaps: As you discover missing documentation, make its creation part of the process. If no one knows exactly how much data a specific source sends, assign someone the task of finding out. If no diagram shows how cloud logs get to your SIEM, work with the engineering team to create one. This is not extra work; this is the work.

Putting It All Together: The Output of Discovery

By the end of Phase 1, you will have moved from a state of assumptions and anecdotes to one of shared, data-backed understanding. You won’t have the final answers yet, but you will have a rich, multi-faceted view of your current SecDataOps posture.

You will have:

1. A clear, executive-aligned Mission Statement.
2. A rich set of Qualitative Insights from your operational teams on their biggest challenges.
3. A comprehensive Data Inventory that forms the quantitative bedrock of your analysis.

You are now perfectly positioned to move into phase 2 of the assessment: Analysis and Strategy Development. You have charted the known world, and you are ready to identify the dragons, find the treasure, and draw the map that will guide your organization to a more secure and efficient future.