Interview with Sumo Logic, Best Enterprise Security Product - Intelligence and Analytics at the Technology Product Awards 2019

Head of Pre-Sales Engineering Clive McDonald tells Computing that companies should not have to discard data to control costs

After topping the Best Enterprise Security Product - Intelligence and Analytics category at Computing's Technology Product Awards 2019, Sumo Logic is working to continue improving its Security Analytics product, and looking at the economics of data in business. We talked to Head of Pre-Sales Engineering EMEA Clive McDonald, about what the win means for him and his team, and how they will develop Sumo Logic Security Analytics in 2020.

"We were ecstatic to hear about [the win] - we put a huge amount of work into supporting our customers around how they work with data, how they use that data for security and for analytics, so this win was a testament to that. The security market is really competitive, so this...is a validation of our approach."

The Technology Product Awards are unlike any other Computing event; our audience, rather than a panel of judges, choose the winners. In this way, the top vendors know that their customers have judged them worthy.

McDonald says that the case studies Sumo Logic submitted with its entry, showing how Security Analytics is used in a real-world environment, were key to the win:

"Without those real-world proof points, it is difficult to stand out from the crowd, so when customers are willing to provide their details and their results, it is a massive benefit," he said. "We have also been innovating around how we use data for security purposes - our Global Intelligence Service serves companies of all sizes across the world to benchmark their security against their peers, so we were able to exhibit some real innovation."

The win will provide a way for Sumo Logic to differentiate itself from its peers, McDonald said.

"Receiving this award demonstrates that our approach has been recognised as having great value for security, and we are keen to expand that even further in the coming years.

"It sets us up to talk to teams across security and promote understanding in how they can get involved in DevOps, in new cloud deployments and around areas like containers. All these new trends in IT are taking place, and getting security the right data around this is essential for the long term."

On the awards themselves:

"There are so many companies involved in IT today, all trying to help companies achieve the results they need. Earning recognition around the work you are doing with customers and the approach that you take - whether it's Sumo Logic or another company - that validation is invaluable to the industry. We all learn from each other, so anything that can speed up that process and improve best practices is always going to be helpful."

Looking to the future, Sumo Logic has two priorities for 2020:

"Priority #1 is security. According to a survey conducted by Dimensional Research, 93 percent of security professionals think traditional SIEM solutions are ineffective for the cloud, and two-thirds identified the need to consolidate and rethink traditional tools. Dealing with these problems will be where companies invest more time and look at how they can automate their security practices. It's hard to find skilled security people, so you have to help the ones that you have to be more productive. Automating SOC tasks and making it easier for security analysts to achieve more will be an essential investment for most companies.

"Priority #2 is looking at the economics around data. When you have multiple monitoring and analytics vendors in place for logging, metrics and tracing, all hosting copies of the same data, it gets expensive, and forces customers to make a trade-off as their machine data grows. Customers shouldn't either have to pay runaway license costs or have to discard data to control costs, which creates blind spots. Instead, we have to look at how to put the right economic models in place for different sets of data, while consolidating the user experience at the same time. Companies don't want to take different approaches around real-time insights to data they look at less regularly. Instead, we can segment data based on whether you need to look at it in real time, for frequent searches or for infrequent troubleshooting, and for full data archiving.

"Too often, we have kept that data in silos and limited the value that we get from it. However, it can be used across teams if you have the right view. This kind of approach, based on continuous intelligence, is what I think the natural next step for data will be in 2020. It's something that we see taking place in our customers today, and that more companies will want in the future."