As enterprises accelerate their migration to hybrid and multi-cloud environments, traditional security infrastructure is buckling under pressure. Legacy SIEM platforms—built for an era of on-premises data centers—now face an existential challenge: exponential growth in log data, fragmented visibility, and attack speeds that outpace human response capabilities. In this interview with CISO Forum, Dipesh Kaura, Country Director for India & SAARC at Securonix, explains why cloud-native SIEM architectures represent more than an incremental upgrade. From the strategic role of UEBA in uncovering insider threats to how agentic AI is rebalancing the defender-attacker equation, Kaura outlines a fundamental shift in how security operations must be reimagined. For CISOs navigating this transformation, the message is clear: modernization begins with data.
Country Director- India & SAARC
Securonix
CISO Forum: What fundamentally breaks in legacy SIEM architectures when enterprises scale rapidly across hybrid and multi-cloud environments?
Dipesh Kaura: As organizations adopt hybrid and multi-cloud environments, log and telemetry data grow at a rapid pace. Legacy SIEM platforms were never designed for this level of scale. Built for on-prem or single-cloud environments, they struggle to keep up, creating bottlenecks and blind spots that weaken monitoring and detection. Their proprietary, inefficient architectures introduce performance issues, lock teams into rigid vendors, and fragment security coverage. Over time, this leads to alert fatigue, analyst burnout, expanding tool sprawl, and increasing compliance pressure. Ingestion-based pricing only adds to the challenge, driving up the total cost of ownership while falling short of the measurable results boards now expect.
Securonix Unified Defense SIEM is built for this reality. The cloud-native platform uses agentic AI across the threat lifecycle to automate detection, guide response, and deliver clear outcomes. SOC teams detect and respond up to 3 times faster while eliminating up to 60% of tool sprawl. Organizations achieve a proven 193 percent ROI through reduced risk and lower operational costs. With 365 days of always-hot searchable data, built-in compliance support, and board-ready reporting, Securonix enables security teams to operate with clarity, speed, and confidence.
CISO Forum: How does cloud-native SIEM change detection fidelity compared to traditional log-centric models?
Dipesh Kaura: Cloud-native SIEM platforms like Securonix improve detection by moving beyond traditional, log-first security models. By applying AI and machine learning across log management, behavior analytics, and incident response, they help teams spot anomalies earlier, reduce false positives, and focus attention on the alerts that matter. Built for cloud scale, these platforms deliver stronger visibility and more accurate threat detection without the blind spots common in legacy approaches.
Traditional SIEMs were designed for a different era. They collect and store logs before analyzing them, which becomes a real challenge as cloud data volumes grow. Static rules struggle to keep up with new and evolving threats, and limited on-premises capacity leads to delays, missed signals, and overwhelming alert noise. Analysts spend too much time chasing false positives and too little time stopping real threats.
Cloud-native SIEMs are built to keep pace. They scale automatically, analyze data in real time, and cut through the noise to highlight real risk. The result is faster detection, more confident response, and security teams that can stay focused and effective.
CISO Forum: In the Persistent deployment, what role did UEBA play in uncovering risks that rule-based detection typically misses?
Dipesh Kaura: Securonix Unified Defense SIEM helped transform Persistent’s security posture by delivering cloud-native scale, deep UEBA, and integrated SOAR in a single platform. With real-time visibility across on-prem, cloud, and data center environments, Persistent eliminated blind spots and stopped subtle threats before they could escalate.
Securonix UEBA provided clear, actionable insights that made it easier to spot suspicious activity, including unusual logins, lateral movement across locations, and insider threats. This visibility empowered Persistent to take a more proactive approach to protecting its global workforce.
By applying analytics and Agentic AI with out-of-the-box use cases, Securonix reduced alert noise and improved detection accuracy. Security teams were able to focus on the highest risk threats, respond faster, and operate with greater confidence.
CISO Forum: How should enterprises think about SOAR not just as automation, but as an operational multiplier for SOC teams?
Dipesh Kaura: Traditionally, security automation was treated as a follow-up to detection. An alert fired, triggering a predefined action. This approach was linear and limited. SOAR changes that model. Actual orchestration is not just about automating a single step. It is about coordinating and optimizing the entire response workflow, with automation supporting every stage.
SOAR streamlines security operations by connecting tools and automating end-to-end workflows. Manual handoffs are eliminated, investigations move faster, and responses become more consistent. Repetitive tasks such as log analysis, threat enrichment, and incident ticketing are automated, freeing analysts to focus on complex, high-impact work.
Modern SOAR platforms also strengthen how teams manage and respond to incidents. Capabilities like case management, playbooks for common threat scenarios, and automated remediation help teams act quickly and with confidence. At a foundational level, SOAR integrates data ingestion, alert processing, orchestration, automation, and reporting into a single system.
The result is faster incident response, more efficient security teams, stronger threat detection and intelligence, and reduced overall risk.
CISO Forum: What are the most significant technical challenges in achieving accurate 100% workload visibility across on-prem, cloud, and data centers?
Dipesh Kaura: Legacy security solutions struggle to keep up as organizations adopt hybrid and cloud environments. Onboarding cloud data sources is complex, and achieving a single, unified view across on-prem and cloud environments is difficult. Data becomes fragmented, tools remain siloed, and security teams lose the ability to aggregate and correlate information across environments easily.
As tool sprawl grows, blind spots emerge, especially where traffic moves between environments with different controls. Traditional SIEM platforms were not built to handle the scale or complexity of modern cloud data. The result is reduced visibility, slower detection, and limited ability to respond effectively to threats as organizations move further into the cloud.
CISO Forum: How is AI changing the balance between attack speed and defender response inside modern SOCs?
Dipesh Kaura: AI is accelerating both attack speed and defender response. Adversaries can move faster and operate more efficiently, making threats more challenging to detect and contain. Keeping up requires response at machine speed, something only an AI-powered SOC can deliver. At the same time, human judgment remains essential. This is where a human-in-the-loop approach, like the one used by Securonix, shifts the balance back to defenders.
Securonix is transforming SecOps through Agentic AI, not a single monolithic engine, but a set of specialized agents working together. Each agent has a focused role, such as identifying suspicious activity, investigating behavior, or initiating a response. This approach changes how SOCs operate, moving from reactive analysis to autonomous intelligence, with analysts stepping in to make critical decisions.
Agentic AI handles repetitive work, enriches insights, and speeds decision-making, while analysts retain control and accountability. AI supports the process, but humans own the outcome. Together, this partnership enables SOC teams to operate faster, more accurately, and with greater confidence in an increasingly AI-driven threat landscape.
CISO Forum: From your experience, what should CISOs prioritize first when modernizing security operations at enterprise scale: data, detection, or response?
Dipesh Kaura: In modern SOCs, CISOs need to start with data. It forms the foundation for every action that follows and ultimately determines whether detection and response succeed or fail. Without clean, well-contextualized data, even the most advanced AI cannot perform effectively.
The data layer matters because it provides the context AI needs to identify threats and guide a response. When data quality is poor or incomplete, detection suffers and response slows. When data is reliable, AI becomes a force multiplier for security teams.
