AWS co-announces release of the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) project

In today’s fast-changing security environment, security professionals must continuously monitor, detect, respond to, and mitigate new and existing security issues. To do so, security teams must be able to analyze security-relevant telemetry and log data by using multiple tools, technologies, and vendors. The complex and heterogeneous nature of this task drives up costs and may slow down detection and response times. Our mission is to innovate on behalf of our customers so they can more quickly analyze and protect their environment when the need arises.

With that goal in mind, alongside a number of partner organizations, we’re pleased to announce the release of the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) project, which includes an open specification for the normalization of security telemetry across a wide range of security products and services, as well as open-source tools that support and accelerate the use of the OCSF schema. As a co-founder of the OCSF effort, we’ve helped create the specifications and tools that are available to all industry vendors, partners, customers, and practitioners. Joining us in this announcement is an array of key security vendors, beginning with Splunk, the co-founder with AWS of the OCSF project, and also including Broadcom, Salesforce, Rapid7, Tanium, Cloudflare, Palo Alto Networks, DTEX, CrowdStrike, IBM Security, JupiterOne, Zscaler, Sumo Logic, IronNet, Securonix, and Trend Micro. Going forward, anyone can participate in the evolution of the specification and tooling at https://github.com/ocsf.

Our customers have told us that interoperability and data normalization between security products is a challenge for them. Security teams have to correlate and unify data across multiple products from different vendors in a range of proprietary formats; that work has a growing cost associated with it. Instead of focusing primarily on detecting and responding to events, security teams spend time normalizing this data as a prerequisite to understanding and response. We believe that use of the OCSF schema will make it easier for security teams to ingest and correlate security log data from different sources, allowing for greater detection accuracy and faster response to security events. We see value in contributing our engineering efforts and also projects, tools, training, and guidelines to help standardize security telemetry across the industry. These efforts benefit our customers and the broader security community.

Although we as an industry can’t directly control the behavior of threat actors, we can improve our collective defenses by making it easier for security teams to do their jobs more efficiently. At AWS, we are excited to see the industry come together to use the OCSF project to make it easier for security professionals to focus on the things that are important to their business: identifying and responding to events, then using that data to proactively improve their security posture.

To learn more about the OCSF project, visit https://github.com/ocsf.

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