Guest:

• Balazs Scheidler, CEO at Axoflow, original founder of syslog-ng

Topics:

• Are we really coming to "access to security data" and away from "centralizing the data"?
• How to detect without the same storage for all logs?
• Is data pipeline a part of SIEM or is it standalone? Will this just collapse into SIEM soon?
• Tell us about the issues with log pipelines in the past?
• What about enrichment? Why do it in a pipeline, and not in a SIEM?
• We are unable to share enough practices between security teams. How are we fixing it? Is pipelines part of the answer?
• Do you have a piece of advice for people who want to do more than save on their SIEM costs?

Resources:

• EP197 SIEM (Decoupled or Not), and Security Data Lakes: A Google SecOps Perspective
• EP190 Unraveling the Security Data Fabric: Need, Benefits, and Futures
• EP228 SIEM in 2025: Still Hard? Reimagining Detection at Cloud Scale and with More Pipelines
• Axoflow podcast and Anton on it
• "Decoupled SIEM: Where I Think We Are Now?" blog
• "Decoupled SIEM: Brilliant or Stupid?" blog
• "Output-driven SIEM — 13 years later" blog

Guest:

• Monzy Merza, co-founder and CEO at Crogl

Topics:

• We often hear about the aspirational idea of an "IronMan suit" for the SOC—a system that empowers analysts to be faster and more effective. What does this ideal future of security operations look like from your perspective, and what are the primary obstacles preventing SOCs from achieving it today?
• You've also raised a metaphor of AI in the SOC as a "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" situation. Could you walk us through what you see as the "Jekyll"—the noble, beneficial promise of AI—and what are the factors that can turn it into the dangerous "Mr. Hyde"?
• Let's drill down into the heart of the "Mr. Hyde" problem: the data. Many believe that AI can fix a team's messy data, but you've noted that "it's all about the data, duh." What's the story?
• "AI ready SOC" - What is the foundational work a SOC needs to do to ensure their data is AI-ready, and what happens when they skip this step?
• And is there anything we can do to use AI to help with this foundational problem?
• How do we measure progress towards AI SOC? What gets better at what time? How would we know?
• What SOC metrics will show improvement? Will anything get worse?

Resources:

• EP242 The AI SOC: Is This The Automation We've Been Waiting For?
• EP170 Redefining Security Operations: Practical Applications of GenAI in the SOC
• EP227 AI-Native MDR: Betting on the Future of Security Operations?
• EP236 Accelerated SIEM Journey: A SOC Leader's Playbook for Modernization and AI
• EP238 Google Lessons for Using AI Agents for Securing Our Enterprise
• "Simple to Ask: Is Your SOC AI Ready? Not Simple to Answer!" blog
• Nassim Taleb "Antifragile" book
• "AI Superpowers" book
• "Attention Is All You Need" paper

Guest:

• Jibran Ilyas, Director for Incident Response at Google Cloud

Topics:

• What is this tabletop thing, please tell us about running a good security incident tabletop?
• Why are tabletops for incident response preparedness so amazingly effective yet rarely done well?
• This is cheap/easy/useful so why do so many fail to do it? Why are tabletops seen as kind of like elite pursuit?
• What's your favorite Cloud-centric scenario for tabletop exercises? Ransomware? But there is little ransomware in the cloud, no?
• What are other good cloud tabletop scenarios?

Resources:

• EP60 Impersonating Service Accounts in GCP and Beyond: Cloud Security Is About IAM?
• EP179 Teamwork Under Stress: Expedition Behavior in Cybersecurity Incident Response
• EP222 From Post-IR Lessons to Proactive Security: Deconstructing Mandiant M-Trends
• EP177 Cloud Incident Confessions: Top 5 Mistakes Leading to Breaches from Mandiant
• EP158 Ghostbusters for the Cloud: Who You Gonna Call for Cloud Forensics
• EP98 How to Cloud IR or Why Attackers Become Cloud Native Faster?