Introduction

For security leaders at larger enterprises, MSSPs, MDRs, holding companies, and private equity firms, the complexity of multi-tenant security environments can be a back breaker.

Whether driven by strategic M&A activity or supporting a diverse portfolio of subsidiaries or customers, organizations grapple with overlapping security tech stacks, siloed data pipelines, and fragmented detection workflows. Security and IT teams must navigate a maze of SIEMs, data lakes, data warehouses, identity platforms, endpoint tools, productivity apps, and SaaS environments; each with their own logging formats, access models, and query languages.

Traditional approaches that rely on full data centralization are no longer feasible. They introduce latency, greatly elevate costs, and require an unsustainable engineering effort without the workforce to fully deploy against the effort. Instead, federated search is a smarter, faster, and more flexible foundation for accessing and analyzing security-relevant data in place across environments, without duplication or delay.

In this blog, you will learn about the operational and architectural burdens of centralizing multi-tenant security data, how federated search unlocks visibility across diverse environments, and how modern SecDataOps strategies leverage federated analytics and federated detections to replace brittle pipelines and detection platforms.

The Burden of Centralization

Traditionally, security programs have tried to funnel data from every source into a central SIEM or data lake. But this model quickly collapses at scale due to:

  • Skyrocketing Costs: Ingesting and storing petabytes of security telemetry across tenants or domains comes at an unsustainable price point.
  • Architectural Complexity: Building and maintaining ETL pipelines for every source drains valuable engineering resources. Add the fact that there are different governance and security controls to contend with in multi-tenant or subsidiary environments, this complexity scales exponentially.
  • Data Freshness & Coverage Gaps: Centralization often introduces latency, leading to stale data and delayed response windows.
  • Governance Nightmares: Managing access control, RBAC, and secrets across tenants becomes exponentially harder.
  • Data Sovereignty & Privacy: United States, European Union, and other governments have differing privacy regulations and requirements, security-relevant log data can typically contain sovereign data or personal information. This becomes a challenge for multi-national organizations who may be forced to have different geographically locked SIEMs or data lakes.

Centralized ingestion is no longer a viable approach for organizations with distributed infrastructure and diverse data sources. You either end up missing out on key insights, being forced to deprioritize projects, totally eschew important sources due to costs, or all of the above.

There is definitely a better way. Trust us, that’s kind of our whole thing.

Data you want when you need it, without replication

Federated search turns this model on its head. Rather than centralizing all data, it enables security teams to search and analyze data in place, across domains, SIEMs, cloud providers, and SaaS tools, without duplication. Instead of investing in complex in-house data engineering pipelines and/or buying point solutions such as Security Data Management (SDM) pipeline tools, access the data that you need exactly when you need it on your own terms.

Going further, the benefits and outcomes that federated search drives also greatly benefits multi-tenant environments, this outcomes include:

  • Unified Access Across Tenants: Search across all of your client or subsidiary EDR platforms. Is one business unit running CrowdStrike Falcon and another SentinelOne, or do you have multiple of the same type of IdP such as Microsoft Entra ID? Glean insights and search across all of them in the same way!
  • Consistent Secrets Management: Managing Non-Human Identities (NHIs) such as X.509 certificates, API clients, and other access tokens is dangerous with one environment let alone a multitude. Simplify vaulting and credential rotation from within the federated search platform instead of a variety of SDM, DAC, and ETL platforms.
  • Accelerated Detection Engineering: Engineers can write once, and deploy detections everywhere, no need to translate across tools. Federated Search is the cornerstone of Federated Detections which you can read more about here.
  • No ETL Required: Search raw or archived data instantly, without indexing or ingesting into a central platform, unless you need for truly voluminous data.
  • Simplify Data Sovereignty Controls: Since the data is never copied or duplicated out of a region, using federated search can simplify Data Protection Agreement (DPA) requirements.

When it comes to managing the tool sprawl across subsidiaries and variation of MSSP/MDR customers, federated search is an anodyne to having centralized visibility without centralized data.

Real-World Scenarios: MSSPs, MDRs, and Global Enterprises

Whether you are running security operations at a MSSP or MDR provider, or are in charge of security overseeing multiple subsidiaries as part of a portfolio company, a Private Equity firm, or a growth-driven enterprise, federated search can help make your life way less chaotic. Of course, who doesn’t enjoy a bit of chaos after all?

MSSPs & MDRs

With dozens or hundreds of clients, each running their own stack of SIEMs, EDRs, identity platforms, and SaaS apps, MSSPs and MDRs often face an overwhelming challenge: how to gain quick, integrated access to similar types of data across entirely separate environments.

Whether it’s CrowdStrike Falcon in one tenant, Microsoft Entra ID in another, or Zendesk and ServiceNow ticket data spread across dozens of clients, federated search simplifies the analyst experience. Additionally, MSSPs and MDRs can expand their businesses by being able to expand their compatible platforms if they integrate in more of a Managed SOC (mSOC) style. No need to divert important engineering resources towards R&D for new connections when a federated search platform like Query does the work for you.

Rather than building custom pipelines or learning different query languages per environment, federated search enables security analysts to use a single interface and consistent query model to:

  • Perform investigations across tenant environments in real time
  • Query identity, endpoint, cloud, and ticketing data without duplicating or ingesting it
  • Simplify search, triage, and threat hunting workflows across disparate systems

This unification saves time, reduces human error, and helps MSSPs and MDRs deliver more consistent outcomes across their client base.

Global Enterprises

For large enterprises, multi-national organizations, holding companies, or private equity firms, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) can be a core strategy for growth. Each acquisition introduces new infrastructure, security tools, identity providers, and business systems, many of which must remain operational for extended periods during transition – or even permanently.

Pre-merger due diligence often involves assessing the security posture of the target entity, including their EDR, SIEM, IAM, and SaaS toolsets. Federated search simplifies this assessment by enabling security teams to access and query data from the target’s existing systems, without requiring time-consuming and expensive data migrations or tool standardization. Seriously, in 15 minutes or less for most straightforward configurations, you can be up and running with cloud, identity, network, SaaS, and security telemetry.

Post-merger, organizations are often left with a fragmented landscape of legacy and modern security systems across newly combined entities. Federated search makes it possible to:

  • Instantly gain visibility into all entities’ security data without centralizing it
  • Normalize and query across multiple SIEMs and identity providers during the integration phase
  • Detect threats and perform investigations across entities using consistent workflows

For holding companies and private equity firms managing a portfolio of semi-autonomous subsidiaries, federated search allows each business unit to maintain its preferred tools, while still enabling centralized oversight and threat visibility at the parent level. This balance between autonomy and control dramatically simplifies the operational burden and accelerates risk reduction.

SecDataOps Alignment: The Engine Behind It All

At its core, federated search empowers SecDataOps: blending security, data engineering, and operations to improve detection speed and reduce operational friction, especially in multi-tenant environments. SecDataOps is all about effectively operating with security data to improve security outcomes.

Multi-tenancy introduces significant operational overhead: siloed data pipelines, overlapping tools, and the burden of maintaining detection logic across inconsistent environments. Federated search helps eliminate or significantly reduce the need for ancillary Security Data Management (SDM) tooling, such as managed data pipelines or third-party detection-as-code platforms, by providing capabilities natively within the search interface.

With solutions like Query Federated Search, teams gain powerful capabilities including:

  • Just-in-time normalization of search results, enabling consistent schemas across sources without complex pre-processing
  • Translation between differing query languages (e.g., KQL, SPL, SQL), simplifying analyst workflows
  • Federated Analytics capabilities, allowing teams to build cross-source dashboards, reports, and risk insights
  • Federated Detection functionality, where detections can be defined and executed across environments without replication or ingestion

This architectural approach supports fast, iterative detection engineering and analytics at scale, while reducing the cost and complexity associated with traditional centralized models.

By integrating federated search into a broader SecDataOps strategy, organizations managing multiple tenants—whether internal business units or external clients—can rapidly scale detection and response without being bogged down by legacy integration challenges or brittle ETL processes.

Conclusion

As we’ve covered, managing security in multi-tenant environments – whether across business units, subsidiaries, or customer ecosystems – comes with overwhelming complexity and cost. Traditional approaches that rely on data centralization no longer scale in a world shaped by M&A activity, cloud-native architectures, and decentralized SaaS tool adoption.

Federated search has emerged as a transformative solution. It enables just-in-time access to critical security data, empowers analysts with normalized and translated search results, and eliminates the need for brittle pipelines and duplicative data ingestion. When paired with a thoughtful SecDataOps strategy, federated search helps eliminate the sprawl of ancillary tooling and lets teams focus on high-value detection, response, and risk reduction.

You’ve learned how MSSPs, MDRs, holding companies, and global enterprises are harnessing federated search to simplify investigations, unify multi-tenant operations, and deploy scalable federated analytics and detections.

If your organization is ready to simplify security operations, accelerate time-to-value, and eliminate the cost and complexity of centralization, start by making federated search the backbone of your security data strategy. For more information reach out to the Query sales team to book a demo and see how Query Federated Search can help deconflict your multi-tenancy and data sovereignty burdens!

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